At CCC, we are committed to cooperating with the scholarly publishing community to support your evolving publishing models. In 2025, with your input, we delivered another year of impactful product enhancements, relevant community conversations, and deep industry knowledge to help publishers navigate the changing landscape.
In case you missed any, here is a roundup of the top 10 highlights from 2025, curated by our scholarly communications experts:
Improved search results, an updated interface, and fewer sign-ins. What’s not to like?
We recently gave our industry-leading, expertly curated database of global organizations that fund, create, and use scholarly research a facelift. Previously known as Ringgold Identify Database, the product is now called Ringgold Organizations.
“Being involved in the delivery of Ringgold Organizations was an honor. Huge congratulations to the entire team for bringing this complex project to life!” said Tracy Pequeno, Product Manager at CCC.
We released a major expansion to RightsLink Author Services, with new capabilities enabling publishers to automate targeted promotional offers and publication charges for authors at key points across the publication lifecycle.
“With this expansion, we worked in collaboration with the publishing community to enable experimentation, diversification, and scalability,” said Jessica Thibodeau, Senior Director, Information & Content Solutions at CCC.
2025 was jam-packed with news on pending AI training cases in the US, Japan, Europe, China and the UK. 2025 brought preliminary decisions in the US, as well as decisions in other countries such as Denmark, Germany, and the UK; some with vastly different results.
We monitored and analyzed the news, sharing timely information to help our participating publishers stay informed and navigate the evolving legislative landscape around AI.
“It is of course possible that in 5-10 years we will have judicially or legislatively imposed global norms, but that is increasingly unlikely,” said Roy Kaufman, Managing Director, Business Development at CCC. “If you want certainty, licensing is the only approach.”
In this two-part series, CCC product management leaders Shannon Reville and Stephen Howe broke down the concept of affiliation disambiguation, why it matters in scholarly publishing, and what publishers can do to improve data quality.
“CCC’s tools are making waves for our customers thanks to the help they provide in cleaning up this kind of data, but the conversation about this problem has more angles than you might think,” said Reville.
OA Intelligence, our software solution that helps publishers automate data enrichment, modeling, and analysis to accelerate OA strategy, was named a Gold winner in the Society of Scholarly Publishing’s (SSP) 2025 Excellence in Publishing, Information Technology & Communications (EPIC) Awards.
The awards highlighted the remarkable achievements of individuals and teams who are advancing scholarly publishing through creativity, collaboration, and cutting-edge innovation.
“A remarkable achievement by a talented team. Simplifying OA data modeling and analysis for publishers and their institutional partners is very rewarding work,” said Jamie Carmichael, Senior Director, Information & Content Solutions at CCC.
For the second year in a row, we hosted a series of virtual “camp” meetups where RightsLink for Scientific Communications publishers discussed transforming publishing models, technology, and workflows.
“These sessions are an opportunity for RightsLink customers to come together, bounce ideas off each other, and learn what their peers are up to. Selfishly, it is also an opportunity for me to get to know my customers better and find the common ground that ought to be worked into our platform,” said Reville. “We made some critical discoveries in 2025 and I Iook forward to building an inspired agenda for 2026!”
Through a collaboration with China Educational Publications Import & Export Corporation (CEPIEC), CCC’s RightsLink for Scientific Communications publishers can now offer digital wallet options including Alipay and WeChat, payment in RMB, and more.
“The most rewarding part of my job is delivering on user needs. Collaborating with the team at CEPIEC to offer a local payment experience for authors in China who choose open access tops my highlight reel this year,” Carmichael said.
In an engaging panel session we hosted at Frankfurt Book Fair, industry experts discussed the interplay between AI developers, users, and publishers, debated questions of infringement, fair use, and tolerated uses, and shared their experience of practical approaches to licensing.
“One of the highlights of 2025 for me has been a ton of learning, education, discussion, thought leadership, and product development around AI,” said Erin Foley, Director, Rightsholder Relations at CCC.
- Ringgold grows global connections in Africa and India
We are proud to work with organizations around the world to strengthen the infrastructure that supports scholarly communication. This year, our Ringgold data team curated thousands of new organization records, integrating data from the Training Centre in Communication – Africa and India’s One Nation, One Subscription consortium.
“We remain committed to enhancing the Ringgold data to support new business models and use cases,” Thibodeau said.
We supported research to provide rich insights about the future of society publishing—directly from society publishers themselves.
“In a year full of highlights, near the top of my professional highlight reel was being included in Society for Scholarly Publishing’s poster session at their annual conference and being given the opportunity to share industry research conducted by our friends at Research Consulting Limited,” said Casey Pickering, Product Marketing Director at CCC.
Continuous collaboration with the scholarly publishing community is essential to what we do. To join the conversation and get the latest updates, follow CCC Scholarly Communications Suite on LinkedIn.