November 2, 2023
On Tuesday—Halloween here in the US—cOAlition S released a new open access blueprint, one that, in effect, proposes to dismantle the prevailing journal system. Under an anodyne title (“Toward Responsible Publishing”), the group of (mostly) European state funders and...
October 30, 2023
Adam Hyde, John Chodacki, and Paul Shanon, writing on FORCE11’s Upstream on seven key roles that “AI” could play in a scholarly publishing workflow: Extract: Identify and isolate specific entities or data points within the content. Validate: Verify the accuracy and...
October 20, 2023
From Retraction Watch: An article that proposed potential benefits of private equity firms investing in autism service providers has been removed from the journal in which it was published. The author is founder and CEO of the Behavioral Health Center of Excellence...
October 17, 2023
My colleague Sue Curry Jansen and I, writing for The Hedgehog Review draft the neglected philosopher Susanne Langer as AI critic: Our modest objective here is to add a historical dimension to the critical toolkit by highlighting the work of a profoundly...
October 12, 2023
Announced in July, Springer Nature’s acquisition of protocols.io didn’t attract much attention: protocols.io will form part of Springer Nature’s expanding Solutions business which is committed to providing researchers, and their institutions, with a comprehensive...
October 10, 2023
Per Pippin, writing in LSE Impact on a Diamond Open Access Fund: Read-and-Publish deals are likely to be short lived; they were, after all, supposed to be ‘transitional deals’. The public money that has so far been spent on these deals could be better invested in this...
September 8, 2023
Note: This essay was recently published in Amerikastudien/American Studies, as part of a Forum on Digitization, Digital Humanities, and American Studies. The essay carries a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, Wiley, and SAGE:...
September 4, 2023
Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Silicon Valley for-profit Coursera, on the Coursera blog: The job market is changing rapidly, and to meet new employer and student demands, universities must also evolve. Today, I’m excited to announce that Coursera and the University of...
August 28, 2023
Philip Cohen, on his blog, addressing the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) shameful obstructionism on open access: Alondra Nelson has had a storied career in American social science. After joining the Yale sociology faculty in 2009, she wrote, among many...
August 17, 2023
Speaking of the MIT Press, sometime in mid-April the press’s OA books began including a full-book, single-button download.1 Finally! As I and others have complained, the chapter-by-chapter download mode used by JSTOR, Project MUSE, and a number of OA publishers (MIT...
August 17, 2023
An excellent Chronicle piece [paywalled, alas] from Sarah Kember (Goldsmiths Press) and Amy Brand (the MIT Press), on the slate of well-intentioned OA policies from the U.S., Europe, and Britain: As the heads of progressive university presses on two sides of the North...
August 15, 2023
Martin Eve: For me, the fundamental meta-principle, or ideal, that underpins POSI (the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure) is forkability and persistence. Taken on aggregate and implemented, an organization that signs up for POSI should be duplicable. That...
August 15, 2023
The Royal Society of Chemistry, announcing still-more transformative [sic] agreements: The growth of transformative agreements within the North America region includes multiple read and publish deals in the USA and new country deals in Mexico and Canada. This builds...
August 14, 2023
Gaynor Redvers-Mutton of the Biochemical Society, in an [interview with Scholastica](https://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/cultivating-sustainable-in-house-publishing-pt2/) on the Society’s disastrous dalliance with APCs: > Commercially, the rationale inbuilt to the...
August 14, 2023
Goldie Blumenstyk, [writing for *The Chronicle*](https://www.chronicle.com/newsletter/the-edge/2022-07-27) [paywalled] on her conversation with Cathie Smith, interim head of the nonprofit slated to inherit $800 million from the...
July 10, 2023
Lars Wenaas, in a 2002 Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analysis study of Norwegian read-and-publish (i.e., “transformative”) deals, found that the deals drove scholars to publish in high-prestige hybrid journals over full-OA journals and green repositories. Hardly a...
June 27, 2023
A good story, from Fast Company, on social media sites’ discrimination against researchers: Independent researchers have used web scraping to reveal large-scale disinformation operations, horrifying malfunctions in platform algorithms, and more. But scraped data isn’t...
June 23, 2023
From the press release announcing Clarivate’s partnership with AI21 Labs (“a pioneer in generative artificial intelligence”): The collaboration will integrate large language models into solutions from Clarivate, to enable intuitive academic conversational search and...
June 23, 2023
Simmons University, a Boston women’s college, is cutting literature, philosophy, and sociology, among other majors—according to Inside Higher Ed. Enrollment is way down, but another challenge is the institution’s for-profit online-ed “partner”: President Lynn Perry...
June 22, 2023
Steven Inchcoombe, “Chief Publishing Officer” at Springer Nature, in a January Scholarly Kitchen interview, asked what publishing innovation he’s most proud of: For me, I look at the work we have been doing using AI to enable summarizations (for different levels of...
