March 11, 2025
Back in January, I wrote about a surprising, and disappointing, sin of omission at the Charleston Hub’s Against the Grain podcast. I’m a fan of Charleston and its parent organization, Annual Reviews, for a slew of reasons (just one of which is the AR’s pioneering role...
March 8, 2025
On the edge of scholarly-publishing relevance, a new journal that I’ve been building with Jamie Cohen-Cole and Philippe Fontaine—History of Social Science—has launched its first issue. The journal is published for the Society for the History of Recent Social Science...
January 1, 2025
The Charleston Hub (with its storied history) is an important institution in the scholarly-publishing orbit. Its most visible project is the Charleston Conference, meeting since 1980 and an indispensable gathering for librarians and publishers. In 2023 the conference...
December 19, 2024
A heroic study, given the data-collection challenges, on public funding for OA journals in Europe: The study includes two separate components, collecting data separately for each European country (including transcontinental states): (1) the volume and key bibliometric...
December 18, 2024
From a new, important paper, just published in the Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship: […] in scholarly publishing, a small number of companies with market dominance have been able to capture and use the surplus value created through the publishing lifecycle....
December 9, 2024
Christian Boomsma, in a nice piece on Elsevier’s data extractivism: When UG philosopher Titus Stahl is mulling over a new research topic, he has a range of tools available to help him get started. He could use academic search engine Scopus, for example, to point him...
November 11, 2024
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...
November 9, 2024
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...
October 28, 2024
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...
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,...
