Each December, as schedules slow and the days grow shorter, our team at Cabells turns to our favorite end-of-year tradition: reflecting on the books that moved us, challenged us, or simply gave us an excuse to unplug for a while. Our list below, diverse in genre, style, and voice, captures not just what we read in 2025, but how we experienced the world through fiction, memoir, and sharp-eyed nonfiction.

If there is a common thread to any article or commentary on the state of research integrity and publishing ethics among the global scholarly community, it is usually that there is a need for more education. If only PhD students had better teaching on research integrity issues, and early career scholars more formal instruction on publishing norms, then we would not have the slew of integrity issues we seem to be facing.

China’s rise in research output and influence has coincided with the U.S. government’s increased focus on research security over the past several years, according to a new report.

I once attended a financial crime research conference and, at the gala dinner, found myself sitting next to the lead investigator in cybercrime from Nigeria. It was fascinating to hear some of the stories he had to share, including instances of tracking down the people who sent those seemingly now extinct emails purporting to be from some African prince who wanted to put $15 million in your account temporarily while they sorted some issues out.

Explore the impact of UN SDGs on global policy a decade after adoption, highlighting successes and challenges in research and implementation.

Explore the impact of UN SDGs on global policy a decade after adoption, highlighting successes and challenges in research and implementation.

Have the interests of commercial publishers now become antithetical to the pursuit of knowledge?

View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.

This week is COPE's Publication Integrity Week 2025, with five days of online events and activities to highlight issues around publishing integrity. It is COPE’s (the Committee on Publication Ethics) attempt to ensure it addresses current concerns in the scholarly communications community, and each day focuses on a different theme. This year, COPE has identified issues such as DEIA, institutional responsibility, and technological change as just some of the issues to focus on.

I was fortunate to attend the annual Charleston Conference last week, and in addition to the lovely weather and beautiful surroundings of South Carolina in early November, I was able to enjoy a vibrant and serious-minded event against a backdrop of unprecedented challenges. While there was an overall mood of deep concern for librarianship, there was also a resolve to meet the many and varied challenges head-on.

For those of us who have been in scholarly communications for a number of years, one of the most noticeable shifts in the industry has been the use of language and how it has morphed from being almost historical in nature to being at the cutting edge of the ‘tech bro’ vernacular. These days in publishing houses – itself a joyously arcane term these days – one cannot move for agile scrum masters and prompt engineers swarming round their kanban boards.

If journals reject papers due to review shortages, the peer review process itself becomes compromised.

If you are anything like me, you will have been experiencing serious FOMO in the last week as colleagues and acquaintances descended on Frankfurt for the annual publishing social, interrupted intermittently by the Book Fair. From what most LinkedIn posts would have you believe, a good time was had by all, but some of that reporting may be a little OTT.

With more article submissions and fraudulent activity than ever before, journal peer review processes are creaking under the pressure. Nina Notman discovers how AI and automated tools are taking some…

In a major step forward for tracking the real-world impact of research, Altmetric has added a new attention source: Podcasts.

Whatever your political persuasion, in recent times it seems apparent that things are not quite how they should be. Things are never perfect, of course, but no matter your views, there appears to be a groundswell of opinion that things need to change. And with social media turbocharging our keyboard warrior tendencies, we also need to blame somebody for it.