October 18, 2024
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...
October 14, 2024
I have revised and updated my “Large Language Publishing” Upstream essay from January, in a just-published article in KULA: The AI hype cycle has come for scholarly publishing. This essay argues that the industry’s feverishーif mostly aspirationalーembrace of artificial...
October 1, 2024
From the imitable Corey Doctorow, in a good, link-filled post on the scholarly publishing scam: It’s been four years since MIT’s decision to boycott Elsevier, and things are going great. The open access consortium SPARC just published a stocktaking of MIT libraries...
August 27, 2024
From the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) recently released Contracts in Publishing: A Toolkit for Authors and Publishers: Academic and scientific publishing is mainly concerned with the production and distribution of works of scholarly research...
August 12, 2024
A good piece from the AAUP’s Academe on the encroachment of corporate software (like so-called “learning management systems” (LMSs)): While commercialization of data, including user-generated content and intellectual property, occurs behind the scenes unregulated,...
August 6, 2024
From a short piece I recently published in the European media studies journal NECSUS: The real question is political will. If the scholarly publishing system is hurtling toward open access, who will pay for it? There are two choices, in effect: authors or direct...
July 29, 2024
Janneke Adema and Sam Moore, in one of the very best scholarly articles on academic publishing I’ve read in a long time: [I]f you give scholars (for example) one day of unstructured autonomous time a week to work on scholar led publishing projects, a burgeoning,...
July 26, 2024
Arash Abizadeh, in a sharp Guardian piece—a follow up to the mass resignation of Abizadeh and co-editors from Wiley’s Philosophy & Public Affairs: […] as editors of one of our field’s leading journals, we feel a strong responsibility to help build collective...
July 25, 2024
Beth Montague-Hellen, in an interesting Insights piece: When discussing AI, much time has been spent on identifying how the technology can be of use, where it might be dangerous and how we may want to restrict or enable it. There has been considerable discussion about...
July 24, 2024
PKP’s Alec Smecher, with a great layman’s-terms overview of JATS XML: While it has been hard for publishers with limited resources to adopt, and there is an exclusionary aspect to that, JATS has forced scholars to consider what scholarly documents are made out of, how...
July 8, 2024
Axios, from March, on a startup that’s building a marketplace for publishers to sell their content for AI training: TollBit, co-founded by Toast alumni Olivia Joslin and Toshit Panigrahi, basically lets publishers make their verified content available to AI companies,...
July 2, 2024
A fascinating idea and project from the estimable Public Knowledge Project (PKP): We are calling it a publication facts label (PFL). It is intended to appear with each research article [and] emulates the look and feel of the Nutrition Facts label on food products in...
June 26, 2024
Matt Wall on Medium, applying Cory Doctorow’s theory of enshittification to scholarly publishers: Here’s the thing though, the final part of Doctorow’s enshittification process as applied to online platforms is “then they die”. There currently seems to be little...
June 24, 2024
I missed this David Crotty post from the fall, on still-more concentration in scholarly publishing: Overall, the market has significantly consolidated since 2000 — when the top 5 publishers held 39% of the market of articles to 2022 where they control 61% of it....
June 21, 2024
Serge Horbach, Michael Ochsner, and Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, in a Leiden Madtrics post, detail a vexing guest-editing role at a Frontiers journal, circa late 2022: Reviewers are selected by an internal artificial intelligence algorithm on the basis of keywords...
June 19, 2024
As if on cue, Open Future releases a new brief call for meaningful training data transparency: Transparency of the data used to train AI models is a prerequisite for understanding how these models work. It is crucial for improving accountability in AI development and...
June 19, 2024
Open Future’s Alek Tarkowski, writing in March about Europe’s AI Act: Overall, the AI Act does not introduce meaningful obligations for training data transparency, despite the fact that they are crucial to the socially responsible development of what the Act defines...
May 24, 2024
I missed this Steven Harnad piece from last May. It is trademark Harnad: So, you should ask, with online publishing costs near zero, and quality control provided gratis by peer reviewers, what could possibly explain, let alone justify, levying a fee on S&S...
May 9, 2024
I missed this great Markup piece when it was published last November. It tells the story of dorm-to-classroom surveillance through the lens of a California college student: By the time Natividad went to bed that night, Google and Facebook had data about which Mt. SAC...
April 30, 2024
The information conglomerate Thomson Reuters, in a press release announcing an “expanded vision” for its “professional-grade GenAI assistant”: CoCounsel is an AI assistant that acts like a team member – handling complex tasks with natural language understanding....
