The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) celebrated its 3rd anniversary in December 2025. Since the launch of the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment (ARRA) in July 2022, over 800 organisations worldwide have signed the agreement, committing to enact changes in how they assess research and researchers. This makes CoARA arguably the foremost initiative that is seeking to inspire and coordinate change in this important area.

The “publish or perish” race is a fixture of academic life, even as studies periodically warn that we are approaching a dead end. Since the 1980s, we have referred to this as the “serials crisis,” usually pointing the finger at commercial publishers who profit immensely from the scientific system.

I am pleased to share a new preprint that has just been posted on arXiv: “Who Owns the Knowledge? Copyright, GenAI, and the Future of Academic Publishing.” The text grew from my contribution to the 20th International Conference on Scientometrics & Informetrics and is now substantially expanded, both in terms of legal analysis and policy implications.

A shorter version of this blog post in Dutch has been published earlier on the website of Nederlandse UNESCO Commissie.

Today CWTS released the Leiden Ranking 2025. We in fact released two editions of the ranking, the Traditional Edition and the Open Edition. The Leiden Ranking Traditional Edition is the name we use for the Leiden Ranking based on data from the Web of Science database. The Leiden Ranking Open Edition is the name of a new edition of the Leiden Ranking launched last year based on open data from the OpenAlex database.

International research mobility is widely seen as a strategic tool to strengthen national research capacity and global competitiveness. Programmes like the Fulbright Program (US), the Sandwich Doctorate Programme (Brazil), Erasmus Programmes (EU), and China Scholarship Council (China) illustrate this global commitment.

In most scientific disciplines, the standard way to share new research findings is to publish a research article in a peer-reviewed journal. Increasingly, however, the standard approach to scientific publishing is complemented by alternative approaches, the most significant one being the publication of non-peer-reviewed research articles on preprint servers.

Generative AI (genAI) is now ubiquitous in research. The field of academic publishing is struggling with an overwhelming mass of genAI slop and where to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable genAI use. GenAI not only offers new opportunities, as is widely touted, but also creates numerous new problems and challenges, not least for responsible research. What does it mean to use genAI responsibly? Is it even possible?

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) tools like ChatGPT are increasingly finding their way into research and scholarly publishing. This trend brings a pressing challenge: how do academics clearly disclose the use of AI in their research workflows? Right now, many disclosures are either too vague (e.g. "We used ChatGPT to improve clarity") or missing entirely.

Academia today finds itself in a paradox. The ‘publish or perish’ mantra has spiralled into an uncalled race, where the finish line is quantity , and not quality . In this obsession to stack CVs with publication credits, research quality and integrity often suffer. Between 2018 and 2022, research articles witnessed a 22.78 per cent growth to 5.14 million. Yet concerns over research integrity persist.

Leiden Madtrics readers might already be familiar with what some have called a “great project” but a “terrible acronym”: GLOBAL, the Guidance List for the repOrting of Bibliometric AnaLyses. Last summer, we invited bibliometricians to join the GLOBAL Delphi study to co-develop a reporting guideline for bibliometric analyses.