Always good to hear from Caroline Ball @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social & Caroline Edwards @theblochian.bsky.social 😊 @openbookcollective.bsky.social & @ojcollective.bsky.social are community-led & governed collaborating with libraries & offer transparent non-profit alternatives to Gold OA #RLUK26

NASA might have been the coolest organization on planet earth — a real life/larger than life organization that the smartest people in the world respected, kids dreamed their whole life of working for, & even Hollywood couldn’t make larger than it already was. So of course Trump ruined it in a year.

We are very pleased to be able to announce that OBC and @ojcollective.bsky.social have signed a Memorandum of Understanding, committing to work together to achieve a sustainable, open access future, for both books and journals obc.copim.pub/collaboratin...

It's day 2 of #RLUK26 Later today @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social @theblochian.bsky.social will be discussing strengthening library resilience through collaboration ⏰️ 4:00 PM - 5:15 PM 🔗 buff.ly/dPlW9dJ Photo: UX Indonesia via Unsplash

Can open, worms everywhere! That said, it’ll certainly be appealed, and probably overturned by the Supreme Court.

So who am I going to see at #UKSG2026 next week? Raise your hand if you're coming!

This is not just a mic drop, it’s an M&S mic drop.

I’ve hardly published much at all, so my payment from @alcs.co.uk is always a nice little unexpected bonus! 💰 If you’ve published anything at all, I strongly urge registering - you’d be surprised what it can add up to over the course of a year.

"I like to think that anybody would do that," he [Newby] added. I think the whole history of the world ever shows that most people are not this brave or empathetic. May this amazing man’s pillow always be cold, and his pints always free!

NEW The US guided missile attack on a school in Minab in Iran looks like a war crime By me, at @prospectmagazine.co.uk www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/law/th...

Unbelievable. So we're spending £100 billion on a HIGH SPEED rail project to connect the North to London that will not in fact do either of those things? Has everyone connected with this project completely lost their minds?

Metadata is truly foundational to everything about research and scholarly communications - if people can't find or discover it, it's all but useless! To misquote an awesome movie, "if you don't build it, they won't come!" 📚

Fascinating to see the big commercial players with relatively low scores for their metadata - 42/100 for Elsevier, 47 for Springer Nature etc. I wonder why it's such a low priority for these publishers, it's not like they can't afford the staff or the time or the infrastructure?

This guy even looks like a robber baron. Slap a monocle on him, top hat on his head, job done.

Is the world really going to have to burn because the USA can't impeach a president?

This is insane. The school leadership are the ones who should be investigated! There’s not a single book on this list I would be concerned about kids reading (well, maybe Twilight…) and several I’d actively encourage them to read!

We've got a great programme, we've got tickets, now we need you! Tickets and bursary applications now available for #CALC26, taking place online from Tuesday 12th-Thursday 14th May. Hope you can join us! sites.google.com/view/calccon...

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

1/ This feels like a watershed moment to me. @rluk.ac.uk's Collections Strategy Network has posted new guidance on the criteria Research Libraries should use when making their investment decisions on #OpenAccess monographs, inc. recommending @openbookcollective.bsky.social as one model to consider

RLUK's just-published principles for evaluating OA monograph models call for: collective funding, not-for-profit governance protected from commercial acquisition, bibliodiversity, transparency & equity. Sounds familiar! So if you're an RLUK library wondering where to start - look no further!

see? here's the thing. A lot of people are like, the earth is fucked, it's beyond salvation, it's hit the tipping point, but time and time again we see that if we just fucking fixed the problem, it rebounds so incredibly fast. Imagine what could be done if people actually cared

I spy @openbookcollective.bsky.social and @openingthefuture.bsky.social logos! 👀

Anne's great piece should be read in full and is available here: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

New post from Joe Mullin, EFF's Sr. Policy Analyst: Publishers say they’re blocking the Internet Archive because they fear AI scraping. This is a misguided notion: it won’t stop AI, but it will erase the web’s historical record. @eff.org has the story ⤵️ www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...

If you missed the recent @uksg.bsky.social webinar on Open Access and AI, the recording, our slides, and our responses to the (many!) questions we did not have time to get to in the session itself, are now available on the UKSG website. 📚 #AcademicSky #OpenAccess

I have an AI joke but you wouldn’t get the reference

Just done this myself - was all pretty straight-forward. So I'm now @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social - only a little tweak!

Delighted to welcome the School of Advanced Study, University of London as our newest Library Supporter! The UK's national centre for humanities research, backing scholar-led, non-commercial diamond open access book publishing - what could be a better fit? 📚 #OpenAccess #DiamondOA

#FinishedReading: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster by Shelley Puhak

Use this link to email the lords it only takes a few seconds. Please share bpas-campaigns.org/time-to-act/...

Newt Gingrich, leading GOP intellectual, wants to nuke the Persian Gulf.

Recap: Hour 1: We hit them like they’ve never been hit before. Day 1: We already won this war. It was easy. Yay us. Day 5: We don’t need any help. Don’t bother showing up after the war is over. Losers. Day 13: Why isn’t the world helping us? There will be be consequences.

Very ready for some warmer weather now. Reynaud’s is no fun in the winter.

Sad to see the Ides of March becoming commercialised like this. I really feel like we're losing track of the true spirit of the holiday. It's not about how many knives you can stick in a tyrant all at once, it's about the whole community coming together to stab the tyrant as many times as possible.

Did I buy this? You bet your ass I did! folkandfortune.co.uk/collections/...

Oh to be a little Tardigrade walking across a microscope slide. 🫧🐻🧪

#FinishedReading: ⭐⭐⭐ Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind by David Quammen

In many ways, it’s not even the original use of AI that shocks me - it’s that these ‘authors’ (in the loosest possible sense) don’t even bother to check what the AI has produced, despite how much we know about hallucinations. That’s a whole new level of pathological laziness. 📚

Oil company tried this on with my mother, but because they’d already debited the original amount quoted, there was a binding contract in place (she’s a retired lawyer!) so they were forced to honour the original price and deliver. Not a pensioner to be messed with, my mother! 😂

So if using AI actually does erode human cognition the way studies suggest, then it's a feature instead of a bug? The world is gross enough without "take away people's ability to think so we can sell it back to them" being on the list.

This might be the greatest split-screen ever broadcast. They’ll play this in museums in future. (🎥 LCI 🇫🇷)

What's My JND? 0.0033 Can you beat it? www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd... (is it better the lower a number you get, or worse?)

Our 2025 Highlights report is now available! @oapenbooks.bsky.social The report reflects on progress made over the past year & offers insight into how we continue to support our stakeholders while #OAbooks. Press release: doabooks.org/en/article/o... Full report: doabooks.org/en/article/o...

“She’s the exception, I am the rule.” Such articulate cutting through of the nonsense around puberty blockers and eg Keira Bell’s detransitioning from Stephanie Lynnette on GMB this morning. It is also a refreshing relief to see a trans person actually being allowed to speak for once!

“My colleagues and I have found that the more people learn about how AI’s back end works—the datasets, training process, prompting—the less comfortable they are with the moral considerations surrounding these creations and the value of AI-generated pieces.”

Finally pleased to announce my latest journal article (really pleased, this time!), now that it's finally #OpenAccess - as it should have been all along! 📚 It's about why we can't really 'decolonise' our institutions whilst still enmeshed in the thoroughly Western knowledge production cycle.

Here's a T. Rex bored to death trying to bite their own tail. My partner asked me to animate it in stop motion, after she watched a video about the very important topic of "could T. Rex chew its own tail like a dog". The puppet is still a work in progress 🦖