‘Academic publishers: The original enshittificationists’

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...

‘Quantifying Consolidation in the Scholarly Journals Market’

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....

From 2022: ‘Reflections on guest editing a Frontiers journal’

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...

‘Towards Robust Training Data Transparency’

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...