‘The surprising history of abstracts’

Aileen Fyfe, in a delightful, fittingly brief history of the abstract [paywalled, alas]: Many scientists will recognize the sentiment expressed by Royal Society president William H. Bragg in the 1930s: it is vital to have well-written abstracts that can be understood...

‘Tracking the Licensing of Scholarly Content to LLMs’

Ithaka’s Roger C. Schonfeld, announcing a an AI licensing-deal tracker on The Scholarly Kitchen: 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...

SPARC Releases Second Vendor Privacy Report, this Time on SpringerLink

Earlier this month the inestimable SPARC team released the second installment in its important report series on big-publisher extractivism: Today, SPARC released our second vendor privacy analysis: Navigating Risk in Vendor Data Privacy Practices: An Analysis of...

Gary Hall on ‘Before Progress’

Gary Hall, the relentlessly curious and provocative thinker, academic, and publisher, posted a thoughtful Mastodon thread on my recent essay for Culture Machine on “Before Progress. On the Power of Utopian Thinking for Open Access Publishing”—appearing in the...