October 27, 2021
Sue Curry Jansen and I, in a double review of Kate Crawford's Atlas of AI (Yale, 2021) and Frank Pasquale's The New Laws of Robotics (Harvard, 2020): What Crawford and Pasquale draw out is that AI is a way of seeing the world—a lay epistemology. When we see the world...
October 22, 2021
From Scholastica's 2020 "State of Journal Production and Access" report: Transformative agreements were a lower rated option, with 54% of survey respondents selecting “low” or “no” potential and only 32% of respondents selecting “some” or “very” high...
October 19, 2021
The good people at COPIM, in their formal announcement of the Open Book Collective: OBC will act as a collector of revenues accrued for new membership packages from institutions – primarily academic libraries – with this revenue then passed on to OA book publishers...
October 4, 2021
Alexandra Freeman, in an August Scholarly Kitchen interview about her new publishing platform Octopus: Of course people can publish elsewhere as well. I suspect in the short term Octopus will act a bit like a preprint server in that respect. Authors will hopefully...
September 30, 2021
Speaking of the draft UNESCO recommendations, I missed this April announcement: Today, LA Referencia, RedCLARA and the three African regional research and education networks – ASREN, WACREN and UbuntuNet Alliance – signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to...
September 29, 2021
Agata Morka, reporting last year on an OA-books funding workshop: In the Nordic countries, there are official lists, with separate ratings for journals and for book publishers (Norwegian one (also used in Sweden), Danish and Finish [sic] one). They are used in various...
September 23, 2021
From the draft UNESCO open science recommendations: Considering science as a global public good, open science services should be viewed as essential research infrastructures, governed and owned by the community and funded collectively by governments, funders and...
September 21, 2021
The Budapest Open Access Initiative is almost 20: The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) - the first international open access declaration - will celebrate its 20th anniversary on 14 February 2022. In preparation, the BOAI2020 steering committee is working on a...
September 16, 2021
From an Inside Higher Ed story on a pair of new reports measuring the program-specific "return on investment" at U.S. colleges and universities: Among those earning bachelor’s degrees, the Third Way report found that 100 percent of nursing and engineering...
September 14, 2021
*Inside Higher Ed*, on the [latest blockbuster merger in for-profit higher-ed](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/09/14/blackboard-merge-anthology-creating-massive-ed-tech-company): > Anthology, which emerged a year ago from the combination of three higher...
September 13, 2021
From a [press release](https://emeritus.org/newsroom/emeritus-supercharges-mission-to-make-high-quality-education-affordable-and-accessible-through-650-million-capital-raise-led-by-accel-and-softbank-vision-fund-2/) announcing a $650 investment by Accel and Softbank...
September 9, 2021
Jon Treadway and Sarah Greaves, in their August [Scholarly Kitchen post](https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/08/03/guest-post-one-publisher-to-rule-them-all-consolidation-trends-in-the-scholarly-communications-and-research-sectors/) predicting more consolidation...
September 7, 2021
Thaiane Moreira de Oliveira, together with nine Latin American co-authors, in an [important rejoinder](https://academic.oup.com/joc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/joc/jqab025/6359522) to an [open science (OS)...
September 1, 2021
Ansh Bhatnagar, [writing for *Tribune*](https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/08/we-cant-trust-the-market-with-scientific-knowledge), the revived magazine of the British left: > Scientific knowledge doesn’t just need to be free to read – it needs to be owned and...
August 31, 2021
Gabe Stein, in a smart critique of Joseph Berstein's Harper's takedown of 'Big Disinfo' Thus, explaining away attempts to understand the information ecosystem as merely the theater the Establishment needs “to build a political world that still makes sense,” as...
August 30, 2021
Gareth Leng and Rhodri Igor Leng, in an excerpt from their 2020 book The Matter of Facts: Pieter Kroonenberg, a Dutch statistician, discovered a nonexistent paper that had been cited more than 400 times. The phantom paper was cited as: Van der Geer, J., Hanraads, J....
August 29, 2021
Arthur Levine—a reliable source for higher-ed disaster-porn—in a Chronicle piece (co-authored with Scott Van Pelt): Anticipating such upheaval, some institutions are already evolving. […] To look forward rather than backward is no easy feat. Colleges must confront...
August 23, 2021
From my just-published Commonplace piece on the mission-aligned funding exchange: Any alternative to the prevailing scholarly communication system must be built atop a different funding model, one that excludes neither readers nor authors. In broad strokes, that model...
August 19, 2021
Erin Rose Glass, in a smart 2019 post I only just discovered: Open access has a surveillance problem. No, I don’t mean to suggest that open access is necessarily surveillant, or that it is aiding and abetting the digital surveillance industrial complex—although it...
August 18, 2021
Librarian Rachel Caldwell, in a [Scholarly Kitchen post](https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/01/13/guest-post-evaluating-publishers-as-partners-with-libraries-and-higher-education/) from January: > Many vendors supplying academic libraries with collections and...
