Our new and improved Bellingcat Toolkit is one-year-old today! If you haven't used it yet its a one-stop shop for discovering useful open source tools, maintained by an amazing group of volunteers. You can find use cases, guidance and honest reviews for each tool. bellingcat.gitbook.io/toolkit

Coming up now at the #OASPA2025 poster session, @nielsstern.bsky.social will be presenting on behalf of the @operaseu.bsky.social #OABooks SIG. Preview the poster, 'Building a Stronger OA Book Ecosystem' below!

JOIN US! *Beyond Certainty - What does 'Discovery' mean in an open and artificially intelligent world?* Symposium on Wed 8 Oct. Keynote by @mcintold.bsky.social "Untrustworthy & Unquestioned Information - What Could go Wrong?" Full program www.deakin.edu.au/library/abou... #OASPA2025

And in other news, water is wet, the Pope is Catholic, and bears defecate in sylvan environs...

We are really looking forward to you joining us Caroline @heroicendeavour.bsky.social!

This year’s Open and Engaged Conference aligns with the Open Access Week 2025 theme, “Who Owns Our Knowledge?”, by exploring the power, ethics, and responsibility embedded in how cultural heritage is created, shared, and preserved. Register here: openscholarship.gitbook.io/open-and-eng...

Love to see academic libraries making this kind of stand, and as important, getting institutional backing to do so. Investing in the future instead of getting further enmeshed in expensive and unequal R&P deals! 👏

I'll be at the joint @wikimediafoundation.org / @britishlibrary.bsky.social / @wikimediauk.bsky.social event at the British Library next month on AI and the information ecosystem - am I likely to see any of you there? 📚 #AcademicSky

What is exhausting about these kinds of articles is that even when they briefly mention ethical or environmental concerns (and almost never, labor concerns), those are for "discussion" or "conversation," never as a reason to slow down or stop using AI. 📚 www.libraryjournal.com/story/ai-inf...

Kudos to these authors for framing their scoping review of #GenAI effects across individual, community, and system levels. There's not a lot of high-quality GenAI x misinformation research out there, but this review identifies promising future research directions. #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky

Woohoo great to have @heroicendeavour.bsky.social on board! Welcome to the #CopimCommunity 🧡

I've signed the contract, so it's official now! Next month I'll be starting a whole new professional life as the Community Engagement Lead at the @openbookcollective.bsky.social - which if you know anything about me and my work with #ebookSOS, is right up my alley! 📚

The future belongs to publishers and providers (like Open Humanities Commons and Open Book Publishers) who are rethinking the ownership of knowledge.

Retrospectively removing indefinite leave to remain would be immoral and economically damaging. It would tear families apart. Attacking it as ‘potentially illegal’ is completely beside the point. Argue with the (awful) idea. Don’t try ’well, actually you can’t do that’.

I’ll be making a video appearance at this symposium, alongside @aj-boston.bsky.social, speaking about AI, ethics, and reclaiming agency. The whole programme looks amazing, and if time zones weren’t a thing, I’d be there live for all of it! 📚 #AcademicSky

Excellent @stephenharrison.com piece about Wikipedia, breaking news, and the right wing outrage machine that's kicked into high gear around articles about Charlie Kirk and the killing of Iryna Zarutska. slate.com/technology/2...

Came into work this morning to one of our cleaners singing along to his music, loudly, enthusiastically, thoroughly off-key. He was either completely oblivious to everyone around him being very English, huffing and rolling their eyes but not actually saying anything, or just didn't care. Respect.

More and more of my time is wasted double-checking non-existent references, it's infuriating.

TERRORISM EXPERT HERE: He cannot designate an idea as a terrorist group. There is no org called ANTIFA. There is no leadership or funding path or no membership. Also there is no terrorism law in America. Ask Luigi. He wants to call anyone a terrorist. That’s Fascism. #ReleaseTheEpsteinFiles

Becoming increasingly clear we’re gonna have to build a parallel infrastructure for all the media we really love. The reason all of this is happening under the color of law is hyperconsolidation, dissent being traded straight up for merger approval, or fear of harassment.

A reminder that books exist. I say this because we have an opportunity to not make similar mistakes in the ecology of OA books that have collectively been made on journals. Community-led and collective funding are viable and operational alternatives to the more conservative approaches of APCs/BPCs.

“The new Elsevier AI solution will empower researchers to identify emerging areas of inquiry + funding opportunities, uncover knowledge gaps, synthesize literature rapidly, connect with collaborators + accelerate productivity.” Academia should’ve long ago ✂️ ties with such commercial vendors.

#FinishedReading: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Protesting with Rosa Parks: From Stagecoaches to Driving While Black by John K. Bollard

@nlisn.bsky.social is attempting to assess the proportion/spread of neurodiversity across across all UK library sectors. If you identify as neurodivergent, with or without a formal diagnosis, or suspect you may be - please fill in our short survey! Reblogging/signal-boosting much appreciated!

If you're a librarian, please advocate for the necessary budgetary changes. A handful of institutions have been public about their approaches (see @tweeterbarr.bsky.social ). 'It' has fallen to pieces in plain sight. Support viable alternatives like @openbookcollective.bsky.social!

I need a new ‘work’ laptop - anyone got any recommendations or alternatively, ‘avoid at all costs’? My MacBook is ageing and honestly, not great for working on the move, since everywhere seems so Windows-centric.

This idea that racism is something that a person "is", i.e. that they are consciously A Racist, and thus anyone who isn't consciously A Racist should be given the benefit of the doubt in all cases, is one of the most helpful developments for racist ideology since phrenology

what we’ve seen from the right is the most insane case of cancel culture i’ve ever witnessed. the left has never even done close to a fraction of a fraction of what they want to do now

Key word in this article is 'probably'. 'Probably generated by large language models'. There's no way to prove it. All the supposed tells - em-dashes, repetitive language, use of certain words, rhetorical phrasing - are present in AI because people have been writing that way for centuries!

There's a lot in this article about academic writing to agree with! I remember once having to stop and check whether an article I was reading was actually in a peer-reviewed journal, because it was so unusually readable and accessible! But why should that be the case? #AcademicSky

Idly wondering what scope there might be for some kind of collaboration between the community-led OA publishing world and Wikibooks? Could create new pathways for OA books to circulate and be adapted for use as editable textbooks, could even find ways to surface Wikibooks in OA platforms too... 🤔

I ended up at the wrong wedding reception once, at a friend's wedding in Belfast. The reception was at Malone House, and the taxi driver took us to the Malone Hotel - we were on our second glass of champagne before we realised no-one looked familiar and the names were wrong!

I taught a new class today on the ethics of AI for 3rd year Nursing students - if only every class was like that! The students were so interested, engaged and curious, asking questions, posing scenarios, discussing their own experiences. I wish I could skip teaching referencing and just do this! 😂

Why is it always a children's book? When do we get a celebrity who decides to edit a Festschrift or prepare an annotated edition of a primary source text?

It's so saddening to see how a movement with such good intentions has been co-opted and commercialised to such an extent that it's effectively now just a means for channelling public money in corporate pockets. For me, if it's not Diamond I don't want to know. #OpenAccess

every time there's political violence discourse i think about how jo cox was assassinated in broad daylight by a fascist who shouted "britain first" as he shot her, and now nine years later her party is dedicating every moment in power to placating the ideology of her murderer

We don’t yet know who killed Kirk or why. Not that you’d know it from the endless numbers of accounts on X with huge follower numbers, including British politicians, making as yet unknowable claims about the motivations behind the murder. Exhibit A. Extraordinary stuff.

Elizabeth Warren on people who say Dems needs to tone down their rhetoric: "Oh, please. Why don't you start with the president of the United States? And every ugly meme he's posted and every ugly word."

BREAKING: They're scrubbing @banksy The court is erasing Banksy's mural just like it's erasing our right to protest.

I wrote about this in the @timeshighered.bsky.social not so long ago. Spoiler alert - I was not in favour.

I HATE when people compare AI to the printing press, it's so disingenuous. The printing press was opposed by the elites because it put power in the hands of everyday people, and popularized a vernacular. AI does the opposite, by allowing elites to bypass artists and laborers.

Reminds me of the outrage when environmental or Black Lives Matter activists 'defaced' statues and paintings - glad to see people taking the same similarly robust...position...here.... oh. Hang on. They're not. 😑

I love this. 'Skills' development should be about citizenship and social justice and contributing to society, every bit as much as it should be about securing a job.

not surprisingly, @mmasnick.bsky.social raises all of the right concerns about pushes to block all AI from accessing websites: www.techdirt.com/2025/09/08/w...

"Through an ideological discourse analysis of Beall’s texts, the study reveals how metaphors of decline and corruption racialize and spatialize the figure of the ‘predator,’ reinforcing hierarchies of knowledge production." 📚

Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio had a budget of $35 million and every single character was moved one frame at a time by a human being. What the fuck are we even doing!!!!!!!

Adhd diagnosis #adhd #comics

The term "Luddite" as a pejorative synonym for "technophobe" was a technocrat PR coup; that's not what Luddites were about. They were a labour movement fighting to give workers control over technologies which were advancing w/o oversight and rapidly automating them out of their jobs. Sound familiar?

The Supreme Court just ruled this meme is constitutional.