https://www.axios.com/2025/06/25/trump-cuts-contracts-scientific-publisher
This means that the need for a sovereign community-led Diamond OA publishing infrastructure becomes even more urgent. Corporate publishers are vulnerable to political decisions like these, as well as takeovers by financial actors hostile to science.
The Springer Nature VP for Comms denied the story on Liblicense.
https://listserv.crl.edu/wa.exe?A2=LIBLICENSE-L;e93cc719.2506&S=
Springer Nature’s response is pretty vague:
We don’t comment on individual contracts, but across our U.S. business there is no material change to our customers or their spend, and we remain confident about the strength of the service we provide (https://www.science.org/content/article/trump-cuts-subscriptions-springer-nature-journals).
This is a fairly typical corporate response: they won’t talk about specific contracts, claim there’s “no material change” for customers, and say their service is still strong. In short, it’s a diplomatic and defensive statement designed to reassure stakeholders while remaining vague about the underlying issue. So it’s hard to tell what’s actually going on!
Continuation of the serial
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02080-1
This development is symbolically more significant than financially damaging (for now). Losing $3M (potentially up to $20M if all contracts are canceled) out of a $3B+ revenue stream won’t shake Springer Nature in the short term. But the fact that U.S. public agencies are openly walking away not for budget reasons (as they may claim), but as a political and ideological statement, marks quite a shift!
Yes, but a hit we should carefully manage and not be associated with, as we are opposed to corporate publishing for very different reasons. So while we might gloat a little, we do so for political and ideological reasons that are diametrically opposed to those of the Trump administration. That will have to be carefully managed in communication.