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...
