Off to Oxford tomorrow to talk about EDI. I don't really get nervous about the talks & workshops, but boy do I get nervous about doing the travel right and getting to the venue on time. #AdultingWithADHD

Are you thinking of coming to the Practitioners Policy Day at the Festival of Open Science & Scholarship? Lots on Open Access, Open Data & Funder Policies. Over half the tickets have been sold already - so I'd get on that! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/practition...

Happy ALCS money day to all who celebrate.

The impact of bioRxiv in numbers @richardsever.bsky.social

Dreadful news. That school is damaging children by not allowing them to expand their horizons. So many of the books on the list are things I read, or would have read as a teenager. 16 year olds can have sex & join the army FFS, what's a book going to do?

Musk thinks data centers in space wouldn’t need ANY maintenance. I loved @adambecker.bsky.social's response to this on our latest episode of Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000. Check out episode 73: "Data Centers in Space!?”. (with @emilymbender.bsky.social)

If there are any librarians out there from RLUK member libraries who like some guidance on putting these principles into practice - get in touch! 📧

Calling publishers, developers, researchers, institutions & funders — STM has published a new discussion document on responsible use of research content in GenAI. Your input shapes the next iteration. Read & respond → stm-assoc.org/genai_consult #TrustinResearch

4 train journeys so far this week. All of them have been delayed and 2 have terminated early. Really looking forward to going to London again tomorrow...

128th anniversary today of this rather important story appearing in the Lawrence Daily Journal, Kansas

Normally I'm very nice about EMR. As commutes go, it's fine. But today we've had short trains both ways, half an hour delay in the morning, more than that this evening and now they're kicking us off at Chesterfield. Had enough today.

In a sea of opinions about the role of LLMs in academics I offer my own. Apart from being harmful, exploitive plagiarism machines, LLMs rob us of the opportunity to experience the gift of friction in writing, which changes how we think. We must not give away that gift. doi.org/10.1002/fee....

It's a great sadness in my life that I just don't really like tea.

I like an open plan space, but I'm not convinced I want to live in what appears to be the offices of an AI startup...

The details in this thread are another deeply undesirable turn in the state of uk academia.

Can't get to conferences but still want to know what's going on? Alice helpfully lets you know all the hashtags, so if people are posting (and if I'm there, I will be) you can see what they have to say.

Looked at the time and was like "Oh, nearly late for my meeting!". Apart from when I log in it turns out it's currently 8.30 not 9.30 😂

I'd romantised in my head my days of working with the institutional repository, following a process and not having to think about a million things at once. Now I'm having to cover the data work I realise I was wrong. I hate it. I'd like to go back to just leading the team?

This pops up just as I'm writing an editorial about how training people in AI should really be mostly training people about misinformation.

As I get older I'm coming to increasingly radical views like "you have to do things to get good at them" and "you have to think about problems to solve them"

this is such a terrible idea it violates every decent programming principle (like DRY) it wastes massive resources by design it fractures all the good things about shared libraries, & isolates users bc nobody’s code will be identical this is basically juicero for code on steroids

The Crick is hosting a full in-person day of workshop and panels about open research policy - useful for librarians, data stewards, research managers etc. Tues 21st April. We'd love to see you there!

We're looking for a pro-active HE/research librarian, keen for responsibility, who likes being involved with a range of different tasks and is able to see the library service as an interconnected whole. If this sounds like you - why not apply? (must be able to work in London for some of the week).

The problem with wearing a suit to work and never remembering to take off your lanyard is no matter where you are people think you work there! This public service announcement is brought to you by me helping someone find their train 😂

In support of #OpenScience, we routinely ask authors to openly share their #research #code before publication. We are now formalizing this practice with a mandatory #code-sharing policy and clarifying what we mean by code sharing. May be nice to cut-out the box for reference plos.io/47dPeOW 🧪

New version of our preprint on bioRxiv about bioRxiv up. Now that’s what I call a revision – 6 years after the first version! It has new data about our progress and highlights from a massive user survey. 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Would you like to come and work in my team? Feel free to get in touch to chat about the role.

In any other sector this would be front page news along with government funding announcements. The UK just seems to not value higher education.

The OpenAlex blog about pricing makes a Bridgerton joke and I am all for it 😂 blog.openalex.org/openalex-api...

Awww, this is nice on the importance of librarians to scientists. It's not always easy to feel valued in the role.

I hate oranges and uncooked apples are the most boring thing imaginable.

Note from my notebook (2016). Nothing has changed.

Happy birthday to this young man, and really to us all

This is causing despair in academe. (1) We were forced to close during Covid. We had no choice! (2) We're not service providers like a restaurant, we are institutions of state. (3) We did everything we could. (4) This will cripple current students' education. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Ridiculous, if the boyfriend supported her (emotionally, financially, any other way) during the degree then it seems a very fine gesture to dedicated it to him. It's a masters not a nobel prize (although same applies). These supervisors are pathetic 😂

This web course I've signed up to just said that LLMs can think. So I can tell me & the course are going to get on well 🤬

I'm enjoying seeing people becoming educated about who the Luddites actually were in response to AI discourse. Not anti-tech, anti powerful folks making others lives worse through tech. Which seems like a pretty good position.

Once, technology solved problems. People liked having problems solved, so they liked technology. Tech execs started to think of that sentiment as their due. So when they stopped solving problems, and people stopped liking them, they became outraged. "How dare you not love whatever we give you?"

Ah, the wonder of an open plan office! I have a morning of meetings and webinar delivery, so I've nabbed a tiny booth and am going to spend several hours sitting in there.

THEY HAD THE “NO TAKE ONLY THROW” DOG MEME SIX THOUSAND YEARS AGO

This is a solid hypothesis. I'd even say that the prompt that produced good AI writing would almost definitionally have to be longer than the output. Making it shorter and more precise is what "writing energy" gets spent on.

Every month the ITO department at the Crick does an all hands gathering. As part of it someone gives a short non-work presentation. Which means that I was just able to spend an hour of work time looking for cool photos of Janja Garnbret and Erin McNeice for my Sport Climbing presentation 😂

We've updated our protocols.io page to highlight a couple of the protocols published by Crick authors recently. If you're at the Crick, don't forget you can get your flat pdfs converted to the protocols.io format at no cost! 😀 www.protocols.io/organization...

That feeling when you haven't done the pre-work for a meeting, and the meeting gets cancelled.

Obvious caveats apply for something off Reddit, but this is at least a plausible thing to happen. I have a feeling we’ll see more, better documented cases that executives want to keep quiet bubble out if the business press over the next year.

Oh no. I have another research project I really want to do, but realistically I know I just don't have time and/or the will to wrangle another set of co-authors 😭 (currently have 4 research projects on the go in a job that doesn't care if I do research)

We were meant to have snow today, but instead it's just poured with cold rain. Lovely.

Waking up to a fight with an author (not ours) who wants to give away their rights to a mega publisher rather than make their work open access by relying on our rights retention policy (and our extensive support & legal teams). Frustration.

Love these. I use the "I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything" a lot!

One of the things that is so difficult about misinformation is that when it feeds into things you want to believe, it's easy to assume its true. This is as much the case for those on the progressive side of issues as those on the conservative or reactionary side.