February 8, 2023
Thomas Klebel and Tony Ross-Hellauer, [reporting in *Quantitative Science Studies*](https://direct.mit.edu/qss/article/doi/10.1162/qss_a_00245/114729/The-APC-Barrier-and-its-effect-on-stratification) on their analysis of 1.5 million articles in the...
February 1, 2023
From Sarah Kearns’ just-published [editorial manifesto](https://commonplace.knowledgefutures.org/pub/t5i7htvu/) for *Commonplace*: > The landscape of knowledge sharing and dissemination is expansive. […] Moreover, critique floods the ecosystem partially rightly so...
January 30, 2023
This late-October MIT Technology Review story hasn’t aged well: [Rumman] Chowdhury says that working as part of a well-resourced team at Twitter has helped, reassuring her that she does not have to bear the burden alone. “I know that I can go away for a week and...
January 24, 2023
Murray State University’s A.J. Boston, writing in C&RL News on so-called “transformative agreements” (TAs, aka read-and-publish deals): On balance, any upsides that TAs may present are negated by the normalization of paying-to-publish, posing huge problems for...
January 19, 2023
Smart piece by Christopher Kelty: What is even weirder, and harder to explain, is that the internet we do have was caused by the internet we could have had. Elements of the figuration of that internet we could have had turned out to be motors of political domination....
January 16, 2023
Reggie Raju and Auliya Badrudeen, writing for 360ino on “transformative” [sic] read-and-publish deals: The nation-wide agreements, conceived in the Global North, have shifted the prejudice from reading to publishing: communities can now read the research but cannot...
January 6, 2023
Forbes: OpenAI—the artificial intelligence company behind the viral ChatGPT chatbot program—is in discussions to sell shares valuing the firm at $29 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal, after the launch of ChatGPT was lauded by many as a revolutionary...
January 5, 2023
Librarian Aaron Tay, [writing on Medium](https://medium.com/a-academic-librarians-thoughts-on-open-access/are-we-undervaluing-open-access-by-not-correctly-evaluating-the-potentially-huge-impacts-of-e93af1de9414) about the potential benefits of OA for machine...
January 3, 2023
Marcel Hobma, [writing in the *Journal of Trial and Error*](https://blog.trialanderror.org/not-all-that-shines-is-diamond) on the APC scourge: > There is evidence that article processing costs give older, more resourceful male researchers and prestigious institutions...
December 26, 2022
Steven Mintz, writing for Inside Higher Ed on selfish colleagues in the humanities: [I]f I were to point to a single factor that is most consequential, I’d draw attention to a dramatic shift in humanists’ professional identity. For better and worse, many and perhaps...
December 24, 2022
From the statement: The crucial role of software in research is becoming increasingly apparent, as is the urgent need to sustain it and to invest in the people who develop and maintain it. Research software sustainability is vitally important for the reproducibility...
December 22, 2022
Wired, reporting on an AI doctoral student’s recent paper: The Abdallas examined the CVs of 135 computer science faculty who work on AI at the four schools, looking for indications that the researcher had received funding from one or more tech companies. For 52 of...
December 22, 2022
James Nguyen H. Spencer, writing for The Chronicle [paywalled], on a public-financing scheme for U.S. higher education: Wall Street and Silicon Valley invest in companies expecting financial returns from these expenditures; moreover, they invest in multiple companies...
December 20, 2022
From the inaugural post from a new blog, courtesy of the OASPA Interest Group of Fully OA journal organizations: The aim of the group – and now of this blog – is to provide unity, not by creating a single voice, but by bringing together a diversity of different voices...
December 20, 2022
Rob Johnson, writing in LinkedIn about last month’s OSTP “Community Forum,” on the Nelson policy’s apparent indifference to monographs: [Chris] Marcum [Assistant Director for Open Science and Data Policy] was at pains to stress that it is left up to agencies...
September 28, 2022
From an open letter to the OSTP: We are active researchers in different fields who wish to make scholarship more equitable. We wholeheartedly applaud your recent memorandum ensuring free, immediate and equitable access to federally funded scholarship. Your leadership...
September 16, 2022
The Copyright Clearance Center (which has, apparently, rebranded as CCC), announcing a new service for publishers on the hunt for read-and-publish lucre: CCC, a leading provider of Open Access (OA) workflow solutions, has launched OA Agreement Intelligence, the only...
September 16, 2022
Roger Schonfeld, in a Scholarly Kitchen post on the private-equity sale of publishing platform Silverchair: Silverchair will not be owned by an investment-oriented private equity firm forever. Sooner or later, it will likely end up in the arms of another owner,...
September 15, 2022
Rachel Miles, writing on The Bibliomagician on the new crop of automated tools that spit out citation recommendations: The Matthew Effect, in which advantage begets more advantage, is exacerbated by automated citation recommendation tools. These tools’ algorithms are...
September 13, 2022
Phil Hill, writing for EdSurge on hard times for the Online Program Management (OPM) industry: Wiley posted an 8 percent drop in university partner enrollment for its OPM segment, Pearson lost its biggest OPM customer (Arizona State University) and reported falling...
