(18 May 2026) Lack of financial resources, staff capacity challenges and maintaining existing staffing levels are the top three constraints on libraries’ ability to make desired changes, according to Ithaka S+R’s latest triennial U.S. Library Survey. Some 81 percent of respondents—all library deans and directors at four-year, nonprofit institutions—flagged financial challenges, in particular. Those constraints sit…
(9 Apr 2026) Today, we published an issue brief on the topic of the evolving relationship between research libraries and academic publishers. With this research, we wanted to better understand which qualities and practices library professionals consider most and least important when evaluating their relationships with academic publishers. At a time of significant budgetary constraints within academic libraries,…
(1 Dec 2025) In March 2024, Ithaka S+R released a tracker of generative AI products for higher education, along with an issue brief detailing our observations on the generative AI product landscape for postsecondary research, teaching, and learning activities. Since then, the list of products on the tracker has more than doubled in length and become more cumbersome for…
(13 Aug 2025) The report considers the areas of alignment and disconnect between the library and publisher communities on academic monograph publishing. While the two communities have come together on a variety of important initiatives, including new models for open access publications, they are facing different challenges and do not necessarily share the same priorities. University…
(4 Aug 2025) Librarians are all looking for ways to prepare for how generative artificial intelligence (GAI) might change our jobs and our users’ research habits. However, the number of new GAI tools can be overwhelming. Happily, ITHAKA, the nonprofit behind JSTOR, has put together a GAI “Product Tracker.” It lists tools that are either widely used…
(1 May 2025) Two and half years after ChatGPT’s commercial release, the higher education community is still coming to terms with how generative AI technology is impacting teaching, learning, and research. Universities, publishers, and other stakeholders in and around higher education have been obliged to react quickly, creating task forces, new guidelines and policies, and other…
New Report Shares Findings from a Qualitative Study of Researchers at 29 Higher Ed Institutions. (27 Mar 2025) Ithaka S+R collaborated over the past two years with 29 US and Canadian institutions to develop strategies for improving the coordination of research data support services offered across different campus offices. The project included the collection of institution-level data about the…
(30 Nov 2024) In a report published today, with funding from STM Solutions and six of its member organizations, we explore how key stakeholders—publishers, technology disruptors, librarians, and scholars—think generative AI will change their practices and processes. The consensus among the individuals with whom we spoke is that generative AI will enable efficiency gains across the…
(17 Oct 2024) Ithaka S+R is excited to publish findings from our international survey of academic researchers, with a particular focus on those in the biomedical sciences. The survey, conducted with the support of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, provides a snapshot of researchers’ opinions about generative AI, how often they use it, which research tasks they use…
(15 Oct 2024) In recent months, several publishers have announced that they are licensing their scholarly content for use as training data for LLMs (Large Language Models). These deals illuminate how major publishers are grappling with their strategy amid uncertainty, but thus far they have been unavailable to smaller and medium size publishers. To understand…