Member News & Announcements, May IO 2026
Artificial Intelligence in Academia
AI in Action Announcing a New Cohort Project for Academic Libraries
ITHAKA S+R, Voting Member, Georgetown University Library, LSA Member, and University of Maryland, LSA Member, Blog Post, April 2, 2026
Academic libraries are navigating a pivotal moment as AI reshapes research, teaching, and institutional workflows. While many leaders recognize AI’s transformative potential—from metadata creation and collections management to patron services and workflow optimization—few have systematic insight into where AI can most effectively streamline operations or how to implement these tools responsibly.
Our new initiative, AI in Action, will bring together 15-20 academic libraries starting this May for a 12-month, hands-on cohort to explore the potential for integrating AI into their own processes. The goal is to produce actionable, shared insights that strengthen the sector’s collective capacity for innovation, while staying aligned with library values.
Open Access, Open Research
JSTOR Transitions Path-to-Open Pilot to an Ongoing Program
ITHAKA S+R, Voting Member, Blog post, April 29, 2026
JSTOR announced that Path to Open, a community-supported open access monograph program, will continue as an ongoing program following its three-year pilot phase. Launched in October 2023 to test whether a collaborative model could sustainably scale open access for humanities and social sciences monographs, Path to Open includes nearly 300 participating libraries, over 50 university presses and scholarly publishers, and a corpus of titles that will reach 1,000 works by the end of 2026.
“Path to Open was designed in partnership with the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and university presses to test whether a collaborative model could align the interests of libraries, publishers, and authors to expand access to scholarly work,” said Kevin Guthrie, President of ITHAKA and Managing Director of JSTOR. “We are now seeing compelling evidence that this approach can do what it set out to do. Moving from pilot to program reflects growing confidence in the model, and our commitment to continue learning and iterating upon its core design.”
IOP Publishing Launches Free Open Data Course for Early Career Researchers
IOP Publishing, Voting Member, Press Release, April 7, 2026
As transparent, reusable research data becomes increasingly central to research integrity, reproducibility and funder requirements, IOP Publishing has launched a new, free, open data training course designed to give early career researchers (ECRs) the practical skills and confidence they need to share and manage research data effectively.
The course has been developed in direct response to demand from the physical and environmental science communities. In 2024, IOP Publishing released a major study analysing data sharing practices across more than 30,000 published articles. It showed that although more researchers want to share their data, many still encounter a wide range of practical, ethical and technical barriers.
White Papers & Reports
Emerald Publishing Launches New Responsible Publishing Report
Emerald Group Publishing, Voting Member, Press Release, April 8, 2026
Emerald Publishing has launched its Responsible Publishing Report 2025, summarising the organisation’s actions and outcomes from 2025 as it continues to work towards a fairer, more sustainable and impactful research ecosystem.
Set against a backdrop of growing political and social pressure on equality, sustainability and academic freedom, the report outlines how Emerald has chosen to be explicit about what it stands for, and how it has backed that stance with practical action.
New Products & Innovations
EBSCO Information Services Launches Art Source Ultimate to Advance Scholarly Research in Art and Architecture
EBSCO Information Services, Voting Member, Press Release, April 16, 2026
Art and architecture students and scholars across the globe will gain valuable new support with the launch of Art Source Ultimate from EBSCO Information Services.
Art Source Ultimate is a comprehensive full-text database designed to support rigorous research and education in art and architecture. The resource is the largest full-text research database of its kind, offering researchers unparalleled depth, breadth and international scope.
Access Innovations Launches AccessInn.AI
Access Innovations, Inc., Voting Member, Press Release, April 13, 2026
Access Innovations, Inc. is proud to announce the launch of AccessInn.ai, a next–generation platform providing API–accessible ontological services designed to empower developers, data scientists, and AI architects in building, managing, and scaling language model programs across public, private, and enterprise environments. Using agnostic, fungible APIs, the ontologies tag content at the level of content submitted, from full documents to chunks, so the tagged content can be used in RAG, Agentic Workflows, Domain Specific Language Models, and other related applications.
“Anyone building or working with Language Models, often just called ‘AI,’ knows that accuracy is a challenge,” states Heather Kotula, President and CEO of Access Innovations, Inc. “The market has now widely acknowledged that content or data labeling is at the root of this challenge, and we solve that problem. We enable AI building workflows to retrieve appropriate data and generate well–grounded responses.”