News from the Field
CUPA-HR Releases Changes in Workforce Size Report
Full-time and part-time staff headcounts in higher education saw sharp decreases in 2025, marking a stark change from headcount growth in 2024. CUPA-HR’s new research shows that full-time staff sizes decreased by 6.6%, ending a multiyear period of positive growth that peaked at 6.5% in 2024. The drop in headcount was even more pronounced among part-time staff, whose headcount decreased by 23.9% in 2025. This steep decline follows an unprecedented expansion in 2024, when part-time staff grew by 21.1%.
However, faculty headcounts experienced growth across all categories. Most notably, tenure-track faculty experienced a large surge in 2025, growing by 7.0% relative to the previous year—its highest single-year increase since 2016. In contrast, growth slowed for non–tenure-track faculty, easing to 2.1% after reaching 3.6% in 2024. Adjunct faculty size increased modestly in 2025 by 0.9%, maintaining a second consecutive year of slow but stable growth, up from 0.3% in 2024. Access the full report at https://www.cupahr.org/resource/changes-in-workforce-size/.
JSTOR Expands Publisher Collections
Beginning in January 2027, Publisher Collections on JSTOR will expand to thirty-six publishers, adding fourteen new presses and renewing all twenty-two that joined when the program launched in January 2026. Library participation is also growing with a wide range of institutions in ten countries participating, from community colleges and small private undergraduate institutions to large public universities.
Developed in partnership with academic libraries and publishers, Publisher Collections is a Books at JSTOR model that offers a streamlined way to acquire and access complete publisher-specific sets from trusted academic publishers. It offers a perpetual JSTOR license to current-year title sets from a publisher, access to all of the publishers’ backlist titles on JSTOR for active participants, and an equitable tiered fee structure set by each publisher. To support predictable pricing for libraries, the program caps annual fee increases at 5% across participating publishers; for 2027, the average increase is less than 3%. Publisher Collections supports researchers by making ebooks fully searchable alongside scholarly journals, primary sources, images, and multimedia on JSTOR.
The program is successfully expanding access to scholarly ebooks while also supporting the financial sustainability of publishing programs and library collections. Through July 31, 2026, 679 Publisher Collections were sold, representing 1,555 new titles published in 2026 and 36,622 backlist titles from twenty-two publishers. Participating publishers also make 2,112 open access titles available on JSTOR. To explore the growing Publisher Collections community, including participating presses, available collections with 2027 fees, and the value of the program for libraries and publishers, visit the Publisher Collections page at https://about.jstor.org/products/books/publisher-collections/.
New from ACRL – Open Movements: Recognizing Challenges and Building Connections
ACRL announces the publication of Open Movements: Recognizing Challenges and Building Connections, edited by Abbey K. Elder, Shannon M. Smith, and Bryan Ricupero. This collection surfaces the work taking place across open movements and highlights how practitioners and advocates can effectively collaborate for sustainable change.
Open movements center public access and community governance to resist the enclosure of knowledge. Over time, individual movements—open science, data, access, education, and others—have coalesced. By focusing their work on the aspects of openness that matter most in their contexts, these open movements have grown distanced from each other and, occasionally, their shared values.
In five sections, Open Movements: Recognizing Challenges and Building Connections explores different perspectives on open and how the values that guide open systems and practices will remain relevant well into the future.
- Forging and Maintaining Open Communities
- Exploring the Structures that Support Open
- Improving Access Points for Open
- Navigating Choice and Engagement in Open
- Reflecting on Our Past to Build an Open Future
Open Movements helps practitioners engage more thoughtfully in work that supports not just broad access to information but also public empowerment.
Open Movements: Recognizing Challenges and Building Connections is available for purchase in print through the ALA Online Store and Amazon.com and as an ebook via EBSCO and other institutional ebook vendors. Order by telephone at (866) 746-7252 in the United States or (770) 442-8633 for international customers. This book is also available in an open access edition.
Springer Nature, Cornell Announce Transformative Agreement
Springer Nature has reached a new three-year transformative agreement with Cornell University Library, expanding open access (OA) publishing opportunities for the university’s research community and providing access to Springer Nature content. The agreement enables Cornell-affiliated researchers to publish all articles that are accepted in the Springer hybrid portfolio OA at no cost to individual researchers, helping their high-quality research reach wider audiences around the world.
The agreement covers the entire Cornell research community and supports both reading access and OA publishing in Springer Nature hybrid journals, including titles across Springer, Palgrave, Academic Journals on nature.com, and Adis journals. By removing publication costs for eligible researchers, the agreement is designed to make it easier for Cornell scholars to share discoveries openly, increase the visibility and impact of their work, and contribute to scientific progress across disciplines.
New from ACRL – Teaching the Whole Student: Compassionate Instruction in the Academic Library
ACRL announces the publication of Teaching the Whole Student: Compassionate Instruction in the Academic Library, edited by Elena Rodriguez, offering lesson plans, learning activities, and other ideas that support student success by developing relationships and student agency.
Compassionate instruction creates space for the whole student to be seen and supported. It takes into consideration the known and unknown challenges that affect and impact students’ ability to succeed and helps remove barriers so that they do not face those challenges alone. It allows educators to navigate the nuanced differences between student success, support, and well-being.
In four sections, Teaching the Whole Student: Compassionate Instruction in the Academic Library demonstrates how libraries are integrating a compassionate approach across class formats and other teachable moments.
- Framing Compassionate Practices
- Compassion in the One-Shot
- Compassion in Credit-Bearing Instruction
- Compassion Beyond the Classroom
Compassion requires action—doing what we can to alleviate distress. This action can be directing people to the right resources or understanding the best way to engage in conversation so that students feel seen and heard. Teaching the Whole Student provides concrete ideas for embedding compassion, empathy, and care in different instruction points throughout the academic library.
Teaching the Whole Student: Compassionate Instruction in the Academic Library is available for purchase in print through the ALA Online Store and Amazon.com; as an ebook through the ALA Online Store; via EBSCO and other institutional ebook vendors; and by telephone order at (866) 746-7252 in the United States or (770) 442-8633 for international customers.
Clarivate Launches Enhanced SkyRiver
Clarivate recently announced the launch of the enhanced SkyRiver platform, designed to give libraries an affordable way to source, manage, and share open bibliographic metadata while supporting interoperability across institutions, consortia, and library management systems. Using open metadata by default, SkyRiver makes records as reusable as possible while respecting contributor requirements, licensing obligations, and institutional governance policies. Libraries retain institutional choice over participation and contribution.
The enhanced SkyRiver platform helps libraries access trusted metadata that support discovery, cataloguing, and resource sharing; connect, exchange, and reuse metadata across library management systems; enable interoperability across institutions, consortia, and library networks; reuse open bibliographic metadata while respecting contributor and licensing requirements; and more. Learn more about SkyRiver at https://iii.com/products/skyriver.
EBSCOhost Introduces New AI-Assisted Research Features
EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) has launched two new AI-assisted research features in EBSCOhost: AI Conversational Search and Ask This Document (AI Ask). Part of the EBSCOhost AI Research Companion suite, these features are designed to help users research more efficiently and gain deeper insights from EBSCO content.
AI Conversational Search allows users to ask research questions in natural language and receive concise answers supported by citations from trusted EBSCO content. Users can continue the conversation with follow-up questions, helping them refine their topics, expand their research, and validate information within a single workflow. As part of a phased rollout, AI Conversational Search is launching first on the Business Searching Interface for Business Source Ultimate subscribers, with availability expanding to additional EBSCOhost databases over the coming months.
Ask This Document (AI Ask) enables users to interact with a full-text document by asking questions about its content. Responses are generated from the document itself, helping researchers quickly assess relevance, find key points, and decide whether it supports their research. For more information about EBSCO’s AI features, visit https://about.ebsco.com/artificial-intelligence/features. 
Tech Bits . . .
Ground News is a website and mobile app that brings readers news from multiple outlets. However, its creators state that it is neither a news aggregator nor a fact-checker. Instead, users draw their own conclusions about how news outlets might “equivocate or exaggerate” by comparing outlets’ coverage of the same news items. As such, Ground News serves as an excellent tool for teaching and supporting lateral reading. Free users can see whether certain news items receive more coverage from left, right, or centrist news outlets. Paid subscribers can access newsletters and learn about their own bias-related “blindspots.” At the time of writing, the subscription tiers are not clearly explained, but the less expensive options are available only through the mobile apps.
Ground News
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