"The closure leaves the East Midlands as a linguistic desert..."

@boydellandbrewer.bsky.social will participate in the "Opening the Future" (OtF) program in partnership with @wearelyrasis.bsky.social and Fulcrum librarytechnology.org/pr/31903/

"We think students should read whole books, we think they can, and, it turns out, we wrote a book about a way to teach them to do that, whether they’re in college or still in high school." slate.com/life/2025/10...

AI and the "Ponzi austerity scheme, whereby universities act merely as intermediaries between student loan originators and the third party providers ... in the increasing vocationalization of the university" defector.com/higher-eds-r...

Coursera are optimising their finances, introducing significant charges for universities as they lean into their status as an aggregator for the online learning market onedtech.philhillaa.com/p/coursera-i...

Deep cuts being made in US HE sector over the fall, as @insidehighered.com reports >850 job cuts last month. This precedes the reported “cumulative exhaustion” of federal government "shutdown" www.insidehighered.com/news/busines... insidehighered.com/news/busines...

A British university complied with a demand from Beijing to halt research about human rights abuses in China, leading to a major project being dropped... www.theguardian.com/education/20...

"fiddling with AI while science burned" www.the-geyser.com/ai-surveys-o...

"Last year he was paid £5.5 million, up from £4.2 million the year before." https://share.google/gqi9EwnPFTdE3nfpw

Informa (owner of Taylor &Francis, which incorporates Routledge) chief executive Lord Stephen Carter has moved his residency from the UK to the UAE and retired from the House of Lords https://on.ft.com/3Jt3D1j

Oxford University Press announces agreement to acquire Karger www.researchinformation.info/news/oxford-...

There is real irony that one is not allowed to preprint until after acceptance ... kinda undercuts the claimed value set of preprint benefits. Yes, early/public access. But the whole thing about improving work before its submitted/accepted is out the window.

I'm sympathetic but ... "Before being considered for submission to arXiv’s CS category, review articles and position papers must now be accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review." blog.arxiv.org/2025/10/31/a...

One of the largest distributors of print books for libraries is shutting down causing major issues for libraries. 🔗 www.404media.co/libraries-sc...

Happy Halloween

Tell me you don't understand academic publishing without telling me you don't understand academic publishing. Author position is rarely a good indicator of who is the lead as it changes by discipline and journal. Also what does lead mean in these days of collaboration? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

“You can only critically assess the output of an AI chatbot if you have the skills to do so, and you don’t develop these skills by using AI”

Elsevier expand their Geographical Pricing for Open Access (GPOA) initiative, using established economic indicators such as Gross National Income per capita www.prnewswire.com/news-release...

"AI returns to the university as part of a broad effort to further corporatize universities, vocationalize higher-education instruction, and diminish both research and research-based pedagogy."

Yet again, we can't afford to let LLMs become a source of epistemic grounding for society.

Academic & Professional revenue growth of 20% following their first AI licensing agreement.

Follow-up to the CUP report urging radical reform to the academic publishing ecosystem echoes longstanding position of DORA (Declaration on Research Assessment) www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

I wrote about the stupid white paper. In summary, with these people in the driver's seat and apparently unbothered by consequences, we're so cooked.

"To balance both our academic and fiscal responsibilities, cohort sizes will be significantly reduced over the next two years as we evaluate the future model for Ph.D. education in the FAS,”

"In 2025, book censorship in the United States is rampant and common." pen.org/report/the-n...

@follettcontent.bsky.social & @mackinlibrary.bsky.social to expand their services to the public library sector following the collapse of Baker & Taylor www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

How many classes today were canceled because a whole suite of EdTech services are built atop AWS? You know what platform never crashes?

@americanpublish.bsky.social latest revenue stats from publishing in the US show significant decline in professional books for the month of July, and also across the first seven months of this year publishers.org/news/aap-jul...

Publishers Weekly update their annual revenue ranking of organisations which publish content to some extent. How many of these are primarily publishers? Let's me show ya... aupresses.org/news/respond...

Frederic Warburg here posing an unwise rhetorical question to his wife following an exchange about his employer (1922-1935) - Routledge

"Together, we speak against the unprecedented government overreach, political interference, and coercive manipulation of public research funding now endangering American higher education..." aupresses.org/news/respond...

Flaubert "was an Artist, while his publisher was a Tradesman." "A publisher can exploit you, but he hasn’t the right to appreciate you. I’ve always thought well of [my publisher] for never having said a word to me about my book." www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

"When AI agents do the work, what exactly is the student demonstrating? They’re showing they can operate software."

"We can’t put the genie back in the bottle; the technologies are her." bmjgroup.com/where-i-am-w...

ICYMI: Workers at the British Library in London have voted to take strike action in a dispute over pay 👇 #BookSky

Every decade, university administrators excite themselves over the prospects of firing all the faculty and 95% of the staff. Early 2020s: LLMs Early 2010s: MOOCs Early 2000s: Wikis

Another report identifying structural problems in the world of academic publishing.

Will this "Blockbuster moment" be like the MOOC moment?

And here's the Tik Tok - https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNd7LXtoQ/

Nine universities across the country, including MIT and Dartmouth, were given a test of loyalty from the Trump administration. Now, students are demanding their schools not sign the president’s 10 point compact agreement. Read the full story:

'The British Library...has taken years to recover from a major cyberattack that disrupted its services and restricted access to its collections. The walkout is set to take from 27 October to 9 November, coinciding with the two-year anniversary of the cyberattack.'

5 million of them are about research

“If we can’t do [interlibrary loans] anymore, or at least there’s a barrier to doing that internationally, then researchers have to go back to old ways of doing things.” www.404media.co/libraries-ca...

EBSCO Serials Price Projection Report forecasts average publisher price increases 3.5% to 5%, before currency impact about.ebsco.com/news-center/...

There have likely been 10,000 or more university redundancies in the academic year 2024-25. @gsoh31.bsky.social, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Oxford Brookes, argues that the Higher Education system as we know it is coming to an end.

VitalSource issue "best practice" advice on Equitable Access for Textbook Publishers suggesting that "misaligned practices" (e.g. bypassing faculty) "create compliance risks and jeopardize the credibility of affordability models"

Over 15,000 university job cuts made in the last year, UCU claims. “This analysis exposes a UK-wide crisis in higher education,” said Jo Grady, the union’s general secretary. Free to read: www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

Sage focus on "Content First" strategy as they offload their library platform (Talis) to Kortext ("a key provider of library solutions") www.sagepub.com/explore-our-...

If you are a librarian, teacher, educator, parent, local politician, or activist who is aware of systemic efforts to ban books, censor curricula, defund libraries, or otherwise attack educational freedom, please let us know..." www.404media.co/help-us-inve...

Wiley's global survey of researchers finds more of them using the tech than ever, and fewer convinced it's up to the job. www.theregister.com/2025/10/08/m...