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,...
July 2, 2024
A fascinating idea and project from the estimable Public Knowledge Project (PKP): We are calling it a publication facts label (PFL). It is intended to appear with each research article [and] emulates the look and feel of the Nutrition Facts label on food products in...
June 26, 2024
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...
June 24, 2024
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....
June 21, 2024
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...
June 19, 2024
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...
June 19, 2024
Open Future’s Alek Tarkowski, writing in March about Europe’s AI Act: Overall, the AI Act does not introduce meaningful obligations for training data transparency, despite the fact that they are crucial to the socially responsible development of what the Act defines...
May 24, 2024
I missed this Steven Harnad piece from last May. It is trademark Harnad: So, you should ask, with online publishing costs near zero, and quality control provided gratis by peer reviewers, what could possibly explain, let alone justify, levying a fee on S&S...
May 9, 2024
I missed this great Markup piece when it was published last November. It tells the story of dorm-to-classroom surveillance through the lens of a California college student: By the time Natividad went to bed that night, Google and Facebook had data about which Mt. SAC...
April 30, 2024
The information conglomerate Thomson Reuters, in a press release announcing an “expanded vision” for its “professional-grade GenAI assistant”: CoCounsel is an AI assistant that acts like a team member – handling complex tasks with natural language understanding....
April 29, 2024
My short piece in the Chronicle Review (paywalled, alas, but here’s a PDF), on C.P. Snow’s The Masters (1951): What Snow captures is the outsize role pride plays in faculty life. We are, nearly all of us, vulnerable like this — a single snub is enough. We live in a...
April 18, 2024
STM—the Dutch-based trade group and self-proclaimed “standard bearer for the academic publishing industry”—joined over a dozen media-related associations to applaud passage of the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act. The reason, of course, is the promise of AI training...
April 17, 2024
Jaap Nieuwenhuis, in a fun piece in The Information Society on paper titles: The question “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” has been asked repeatedly in academic work since 1992, suggesting that it is still unclear whether people (or animals, or cells) should stay or...
April 16, 2024
Times Higher Education, on UK ‘university-business collaborations’ [paywall]: Figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa) show that 76,619 university-business interactions occurred in 2022-23. This was down by 5 per cent from the number registered in...
April 15, 2024
Elsevier’s Judy Verses, in a February interview with The Scholarly Kitchen: At Elsevier we try to support researchers, librarians, academic leaders, funders and governments by combining quality information and data sets with analytical tools to facilitate insights and...
April 11, 2024
Amanda D. Clark, in a February PeerJ study looking at citations in hybrid journals: …. we found that publishing open access in hybrid journals that offer the option confers an average citation advantage to authors of 17.8 citations compared to closed access articles...
April 9, 2024
Tracey Armstrong, in an interview for The Scholarly Kitchen last week: What keeps me up at night is the unlicensed use of copyrighted material in AI systems and the lack of recognition globally of the critical, foundational, and perpetual role that copyrighted...
April 2, 2024
Gail Steinhart and Katherine Skinner, announcing a new Invest in Open Infrastructure report on data-repository funding: Here, we present an initial report on our findings as part of our project to investigate “reasonable costs” for public access to United States...
March 29, 2024
Mikhail Gorbunov-Posadov, in a November article in publications: An alive publication is a new genre for presenting the results of scientific research, where the scientific work is published online, and then is constantly being developed and improved by its author....
March 4, 2024
Alison Mudditt, CEO of PLOS, in an interview with The Scholarly Kitchen about a year ago: Back when PLOS launched and focused on the biomedical sciences, charging authors a fee to publish seemed fair and reasonable. Fast forward twenty years and it’s clear that we...
