September 3, 2026
I missed this fascinating 2022 post on the history of PostScript (and, by extension, the PDF)—by David Brock for the Computer History Museum: From the start of Adobe Systems Incorporated (now Adobe, Inc.) exactly forty years ago in December 1982, the firm’s cofounders...
June 22, 2026
I’ve had some interesting comments on the “Matthew Effect in AI Summary” piece I published last month at LSE Impact, and thought to share a couple. One was posted by Nicola Willand: It absolutely happened to me! In 2023 I (female) took the doi of my most cited paper,...
June 18, 2026
I missed this short Sam Moore piece from the fall: Even though open access was motivated partly by the desire to rein in commercial publishers’ profiteering, it has in many ways simply reinforced their dominance. The article is a taut overview of the good work Sam and...
June 17, 2026
Jonny Saunders (he of the Institute of Pirate Technology), continues to amaze: The world is Big Data, and The Cloud is its landlord. It is our responsibility to ferret it out of its primitive unknown, mine it, harvest it, dump it by the tanker-truckful into great Data...
May 29, 2026
Invest in Open Infrastructure’s Lauren Collister, in a January post based on an interview with Knowledge Commons’ Kathleen Fitzpatrick: The core of that difference is that Knowledge Commons is committed to remaining free and open, to never selling user data, to never...
May 19, 2026
Just published in LSE Impact, on the “deep research” summary-and-citation tools from both the AI giants and the likes of Elsevier: At the core of all these tools is a series of verbs: to surface, to rank, to summarise, and to recommend. In this sense the AI products...
May 4, 2026
Maria Bustillos, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review in September: US libraries, universities, and bookstores rely for the delivery of books on a small number of very big profit-driven companies, many of them privately held, whose commitment to freedom of...
April 15, 2026
Science, on Elsevier’s new summary-and-citation tool LeapSpace: LeapSpace is offering what appears to be one of the largest corpuses of full-text, paywalled papers and books, totaling 18 million. The AI can access articles from Elsevier’s own collection and those of...
January 28, 2026
'Invest in Open Infrastructure announces inaugural grantees of the IOI Fund for Network Adoption' This from November, an announcement of the initial pair of grantees from Invest in Open Infrastructure’s (IOI) “fund for network adoption”: Invest in Open Infrastructure...
January 27, 2026
Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt and Sjang ten Hagen, in their introduction to a recent Minerva special issue: This Special Issue aims to bring these present-day discussions in a productive dialogue with the past, by exploring the relatively recent invention of the anonymous...
January 13, 2026
I missed this piece, from Inside Higher Ed in October: Campus, on online two-year college backed by Sam Altman and Shaquille O’Neal, has acquired AI learning platform Sizzle AI for an undisclosed amount. Campus will integrated Sizzle AI’s interactive, AI-generated...
December 16, 2025
An incredible interactive visual map from the Open Book Futures team, on the OA Books landscape: This is the result of a visual mapping exercise conducted with the stakeholders contributing to the Open Book Futures project, held on Oct 10, 2023 in The Hague and...
December 10, 2025
I want to share a short commentary I just published, on “The Modal Mode of Thinking about Scholarly Publishing,” as part of the Journal of Electronic Publishing’s 30th anniversary special issue (edited by Alyssa Arbuckle and Janneke Adema). Here’s the abstract from...
December 4, 2025
Speaking of ‘publish or perish’: Kelly-Ann Allen, writing in Nature earlier this year (paywalled, alas): In my view, we could make academic life more rewarding by systematically scoring the underappreciated behaviours and conduct that researchers value. The product...
November 19, 2025
Vladimir Moskovkin, writing for LeidenMadtrics, posted a delightful essay on the origins of the “publish or perish” phrase. His sleuthing traced the expression back to at least the late nineteenth century, in an attribution (undated) to Swiss historian Jacob...
November 15, 2025
I’m posting a short commentary here, a preprint under review at Yearbook on Data Autonomy (YoDA), a new OA journal from the University of Groningen Press. Download PDF In the last year, the giant AI companies have released tools with indistinguishable names: Deep...
May 29, 2025
Delta Think’s Dan Pollock and Heather Staines, with data on APC prices and inflation: Overall, OA prices are increasing below inflation. The data suggest that authors continue to get (modestly) increasing value for money for their OA fees. APCS, of course, have never...
May 28, 2025
I missed this excellent 2024 UKSG Insights piece, by Tasha Mellins-Cohen. In a studiously neutral, mapping-the-landscape fashion, Mellins-Cohen classifies the torrent of OA models into five core types. From the abstract (with the types in bold): The proliferation of...
April 2, 2025
Huge announcement from Open Library of Humanities (OLH) lead Caroline Edwards, writing for LSE Impact: According to Jisc’s own review of transitional agreements in the UK published in March 2024, “it would take at least 70 years for the big five publishers to flip...
March 29, 2025
Sue Curry Jansen and I, writing for Psyche, have a new essay out on the neglected philosopher Susanne Langer and metaphor: Metaphor, for Langer, is language’s law of growth. When there is no word available to express a new thought, we reach for analogy – for familiar...
