At MIT Libraries, we are constantly striving to help build "a world where enduring, abundant, equitable, and meaningful access to information serves to empower and inspire humanity." Today, we're asking others who share that vision to support our work. giving.mit.edu/24hc-libraries

Science runs on trust, but the systems around it are often opaque. At @descilabs.bsky.social, we’re building tools that make research records transparent & verifiable, because credible science deserves infrastructure as open as the knowledge it creates. #DeSci #OpenScience

Hey mentors: It's great when your students publish papers and share links to them on social media, but it's your job to help them understand that posting only paywalled links excludes readers and limits their reach - and it's not necessary. Train them yourself, or lead them to better training.

Extensive Propublica story about grant terminations Sharing specifics and putting faces on the research… Definitely worth a read projects.propublica.org/nih-cuts-res...

Very excited for the opportunity to speak at the 2025 Kramer Copyright Conference on “Imagining library futures in chaotic times”

Good news! Release 1 of the 2024 GSS is available for download. The 2024 GSS, like 2022, uses web, in-person, and phone modes. For some variables this can complicate analyses of trends. See documentation. Still a prob sample & gold standard survey w/ high resp rates (by contemporary standards).

This new #RSOS paper investigates beliefs about social dynamics and #OpenScience. Read more: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... @mchris4duke.bsky.social‬ @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

This is outrageous and profoundly damaging. president.mit.edu/writing-spee...

Three things made the US a rich and powerful nation: the rule of law, its science & innovation system, and openness to foreign talent. Remarkable how Trump has taken a sledgehammer to all three. No enemy of this country could do more.

America is in danger of experiencing an academic brain drain  economist.com/science-and-...

Beliefs about Social Dynamics and Open Science, w/ @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social & @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social - royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... While perceptions of social dynamics of your field don't predict open science attitudes, we did find high levels of support for open science (YAY) ..

Please help: Do you know a baby, less than 12 months old, who can walk? We are trying to complete a project, 7 years in the works. And all we need are 3 infants who are less than a year old and can walk, to do a short online looking-time study. 🆘

Please, for the love of science in infant cognition, make videos of your stimuli available (even if you do live puppet shows). I'm trying to read through a paper right now, and there is no way someone could replicate it in good faith because there are no videos and so few details.

🧵 There's a common misperception about SocArXiv, unfortunately promoted by the much larger, richer, profit-generating SSRN service (Elsevier). It sounds harsh to say this, but at SocArXiv we serve the scholarly community, and the scholarly record - not individual authors. I can explain. /1

Firing the Librarian of Congress in a 2 sentence email then joking about it is disgraceful. Dr. Carla Hayden was an exceptional leader, a remarkable person, a brilliant and compassionate leader, and a fierce advocate for libraries. She deserved so much better. We all deserve so much better.

This forthcoming hybrid event at @sheffielduni.bsky.social on 21st May will bring together experts to explore the challenges & opportunities in fostering more equitable publication models. More info and booking links on the page below: #OpenAccess #OpenResearch #AcademicSky

What's Open Science?

What will most transform #scholcomm in the next 10 years? A new survey of 90 #ECRs from 7 countries gives first place to #ai, followed closely by #openaccess and #OpenScience, followed by changes to #PeerReview. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/leap.2008 While respondents […]

What are the consequences of current attacks on science by the Trump administration on #openscience? Join this webinar with the fabulous @rouhiroo.bsky.social and @danrdmnn.bsky.social!

I broke 1k followers recently, so let’s do a book thread! Here’s a bunch of releases I have coming out this spring from @mitpress.bsky.social! Games, trans theory, speculative design … it’s the best list in the business! mitpress.mit.edu

It’s one of the great, terrific weirdnesses of my professional life that a member of the Velvet Underground was a colleague at MIT: www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Sharing the new MIT Liibraries' vision statement: Knowledge for the People ...

🤝 The need to reform research assessment and scientific publishing practices is widely recognized. However, @ludowaltman.bsky.social argues that the assessment and publishing reform movements will be successful only if they manage to align their agendas. 👇 Read about it in our latest blog post

For those just learning about LibGen because of the reporting on Meta and other companies training LLMs on pirated books, I’d highly recommend the book Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education (open access: direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edi...)

Yesterday, academic social media went into overdrive as many intellectuals discovered LibGen (“Library Genesis”), thanks to an article in The Atlantic. Here’s a secondary reading list of some of the material that’s out there on LibGen and other academic pirate platforms. eve.gd/2025/03/21/a...

Dang it Louisville! That will teach me not to rely on ACC loyalty for my bracket picks. (Actually it won’t. I’ve been favoring ACC teams, and picking Duke to win it all for 35 years, not likely to change) Also - Go Duke.

In honor of #MarchMadness, let's talk about how all 8 men's teams playing in Providence this week are threatened by the Musk/Trump Admin. If you love college sports, you're going to have to stand up for colleges!!!!

If I still blogged, I would write something about the USDA journal cancellations, especially this part "but curiously none from the world’s three largest scientific publishers, all of which are for-profit".

INCREDIBLE Ruling! Judge Reyes just ruled that transgender people have served honorably in the military, judges Trumps trans military ban - which states trans people are inherently dishonorable - as unconstitutional and motivated by animus. Trans military members may continue to serve.

'radical, community-led'... transformative agreements?? 'leading the charge... towards a model of gold open access' I've never heard of this 'author pays' model before, do tell! Do words still mean things or are we just slapping the labels 'radical and community-led' onto anything OA-related now?

“The subjugation of universities to official power is a hallmark of autocracy,” Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, said in a statement. “No one should be under any illusions about what’s going on here.” www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

“My feeling is that growth is a bit of a disastrous model for academic publishing,” said @deevybee.bsky.social [...] “If you’re going to grow and grow, you’re bound to end up accepting things that are not good quality.” www.wsj.com/business/med...

Our #APC analysis preprint was cited in a Wall Street Journal story today, along with Elsevier's response. www.wsj.com/business/med... #AcademicPublishing #MetaSci #ScholCommLab @juancommander.scholcommlab.ca @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca

Please consider giving to the MIT Libraries community engagement program today. The work that libraries do to encourage critical thinking and the free exchange of ideas is more important now than ever. mit24hourchallenge.mightycause.com/story/Mit-Li...

🧯 In perhaps the first time the Publish, Review, Curate model was applied to a blog post, today we publish @csmarcum.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy's "Drinking from the Firehose? Write More and Publish Less", previously out on Upstream. 👇 Find the post, editorial assessment & peer reviews on MetaROR

You can have sincere beliefs about gay people if you like and no one will take you to task for them. Except when you try and take our rights away, at which point I’m *really sorry you feel sad that we fight back* but we’re going to fight back regardless.

openRxiv has arrived! We’re thrilled to announce the launch of openRxiv as an independent, researcher-led nonprofit to oversee bioRxiv and medRxiv, the world’s leading preprint servers for life and health sciences. openrxiv.org/introducing-... #openRxiv #OpenScience #Preprints #bioRxiv #medRxiv

Through her pioneering research and advocacy, @alondra.bsky.social has championed policies that ensure technology serves as a tool for progress rather than a mechanism for exclusion. #WomensHistoryMonth

.@LibnOfCongress Carla Hayden examines the essential role libraries play in American life — as community spaces, information repositories, trusted sources, and conveners of civil discourse — in a recent @IssuesInST.bsky.social interview. Read: buff.ly/8CX8NlG

Hey Seattle, join Dr. Oliver @haimson.bsky.social at Third Place Books on March 27th for a conversation on his new book "Trans Technologies," which describes what happens when trans people take technology design into their own hands. Link to register:

The public really needs to understand this. Every university system in the world rests on public funding, there has never been an alternative model at any time in history. We have universities for literally the same reason that we have roads and armies.

Get out and #standupforscience today!

An excellent book and a great discussion!

Looking forward to it. Hope you make it in time - not as fun to throw critiques at an empty chair #ESS2025

This strikes me as a quite reasonable perspective on the NIH. Dare we hope that Bhattacharya is listening? A new Way of Thinking About the NIH: www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/o...

"“For all this talk about free speech, this is direct censorship of scientific research.” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Stand with trans Americans. You don’t have to understand everything about the transgender experience to know that Trump’s acts of humiliation and dehumanization are unjust and dangerous. www.thebulwark.com/p/stand-with...

💥New: Open repositories cannot ignore retractions and corrections 👩‍💻 @freddie2310.bsky.social #Retractions #OpenAccess #AcademicPublishing

The risk from heightened tensions w/ Canada and Mexico is not just economic. ≈21% of US residents have close family member living outside US, including 17% of native-born Americans. CA & MX are most common countries. If trade wars escalate to closed borders or real wars, social consequences huge.