12/5/25: The NIH Policy Holding Researchers ‘Hostage’ (Inside Higher Ed) An effort to make NIH-funded research immediately accessible to the public has led to disruption and financial strain for scientists already navigating a precarious funding environment. It also spotlights the power of corporate publishers. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/research/2025/12/05/nih-policy-holding-researchers-hostage
12/4/25: USPTO Reminds Examiners, Applicants to Consider and Use Eligibility Declarations Wisely (IP Watchdog) The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today released two memos meant to provide additional guidance around the use of patent subject matter eligibility declarations (SMEDs) for examiners, applicants and practitioners, particularly with respect to “applied technologies” in areas like artificial intelligence and medical diagnostics. The memos do not alter existing procedures and are effective immediately. https://ipwatchdog.com/2025/12/04/uspto-reminds-examiners-applicants-consider-use-eligibility-declarations-wisely/
12/4/25: China’s scientific clout is growing as US influence wanes: the data show how (Nature) China is redrawing the global science map, according to an analysis of citation data by the analytics firm Clarivate. The country is increasing research collaborations with European partners, even as it expands into emerging areas from southeast Asia to the Middle East and Africa. The United States, meanwhile, is losing its long-held lead as a research powerhouse and collaborator in world science. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03956-y
12/4/25: Trump has ‘shaken the hell’ out of the 80-year research pact between the government and universities. What now? (STAT) For a substantial group of U.S. researchers, 2025 will be remembered as the year their path to a career in science was closed off, their dreams dashed. For others, it will go down as a chaotic game of red-light-green-light that left them constantly unsure of what work would be funded or halted, but that they managed to survive. For nearly everyone, the last 10 months have revealed that the research enterprise that catapulted the country to the technological fore was much more brittle than expected. https://www.statnews.com/2025/12/04/american-science-shattered-series-analyzes-trump-research-funding-cuts/
12/4/25: 2025 OMB Compliance Supplement released (Grant Thornton) https://www.grantthornton.com/insights/articles/audit/2025/snapshot/december/omb-compliance-supplement-released
12/3/25: Updated Application Policies: NIH Administrative Burden Reduction Effort – Removal of Requirements for Letters of Intent and Unsolicited Applications Requesting $500,000 or More in Direct Costs (NOT-OD-26-019) https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-26-019.html
DOE Updates:
12/2/25: ‘The mission is dead’: Federal workers say the shutdown made an ‘extremely trying year’ worse (Federal News Network) The federal offices are back open and hundreds of thousands of federal workers have returned to work after the longest shutdown in history. But nothing is back to normal — federal workers say morale and trust in leadership are at an all-time low, tensions are high between furloughed staff and those who worked through the shutdown, schedules are slipping and projects are being pushed back, and more people are accelerating their retirement plans or leaving federal service altogether. https://federalnewsnetwork.com/workforce/2025/12/the-mission-is-dead-federal-workers-say-the-shutdown-made-an-extremely-trying-year-worse/
11/14/25: Ethical, robust and accurate use of AI in animal research (Nature) Animal protocol review is a lengthy process. We describe a repeatable approach using Generative Artificial Intelligence to improve the quality and speed of Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee reviews, while considering issues of ethics, bias, robustness and trustworthiness. We implemented our system for 11 different common errors and found every actual problem (100% recall) in the animal protocols with 80–100% precision. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41684-025-01649-7
