INTERPRETATION- of a cup of tea in different parts of the world (a very occasional series). This from Doha airport - en route to Berlin to speak at @chashub.bsky.social Charleston Inbetween.

FINDING THE TARGET: where should we direct our energy? scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/06/22/a... separates the core from the interface when it comes to accessing published material. I feel that the metadata is essential - without it everything is floating freely.

It was a pleasure to present to libraries in Australia and New Zealand about our work at the @ojcollective.bsky.social to provide a sustainable future for diamond open access journals! Thank you @oaaustralasia.bsky.social for the invitation!

📢 Join us virtually! "Academic Libraries in a Reconfigured Knowledge Economy" What should libraries stop doing? What must they protect? Panelists: @mchris4duke.bsky.social @curtisbrundy.bsky.social @dannykay68.bsky.social @msphelps.bsky.social @morleyfme.bsky.social 👉 Register: bit.ly/4or88JG

DO BETTER T&F - honestly how is this still happening? I get that the publishers were working things out in the mid 20 teens (albeit the huge APC income should have helped). But we are a DECADE on. Just do your bloody job!

META? What does it mean when you don’t even get the wheel of death but get the ‘spinner message’ instead?

Our digital cultural heritage is so fragile without ongoing resources. We're reaching a critical point where the whims of fascist politicians are dictating what digitised resources will survive. Who said culture and history wasn't political? www.theguardian.com/environment/...

AGREED: "Scholarly publishing does not need less debate. It needs fewer sealed rooms" Argument that young schol comm people need to be exposed to arguments & different perspectives across the landscape www.uksg.org/newsletter/u... One reason Aust is behind is it is isolated from the discussions

STRADDLING: I cut across a few of these camps - Research Integrity, Open Science and R&D Management and Implementation all resonate....

GOOD ARGUMENT: Have a read of this article considering whether OA has run its course - most work is published OA now, at a huge cost. "Should we re-orient our efforts towards the scholarly commons and the promise it holds for non-commercial, community-led publishing? I think so."

ESSENTIAL: we need to support open infrastructure more systematically - without it, science crumbles. A great article here issues.org/open-data-re...

SAME SAME: The term 'Academic Freedom' has been weaponised by the publishing industry for some time - I remember arguments about this in 2018 - see "Scare campaigns, we have seen a few" unlockingresearch-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk?p=1905

The entire editorial board has resigned from Springer Nature's Natural Language Semantics (NLS) to launch a diamond OA journal, Semantics of Natural Languages www.openlibhums.org/news/943/

JOB (Aust) - Scholarly Communications Librarian at University of Southern Queensland. These jobs are rare in Australia shorturl.at/COOqx - good luck folks!

Kudos to the #MIT Grad Student Council for adopting "a resolution expressing support for campus #libraries to exit #bigdeal journal packages and calling for changes to #promotion and #tenure processes to move away from journal-based #metrics." www.heliosopen.org/campus-rpt-r...

That went fast. Closing #FORCE2026 remarks now from conference host and co-Chair Bella Ratmelia from SMU. Seeing myself from the organising committee, Bella and the local team did an incredible job. It really felt a like lot of the original "Beyond the PDF" spirit and energy finally made it to Asia

We need to be careful of metrics that distort behavior. We need to consider how the assessed feel. We need to consider if our measures of excellence are broad and pural enough, and yet not be easily gamed or watered down to almost nothing.. It's a hard even wicked problem (8)

#FORCE2026 is officially open! “To Go Far, Go Together” sets the tone as we move from “Publish or Perish” to Purpose & People in research assessment reform. Great to see DORA Co-Chair Ginny with SMU President Lily Kong, after strong opening keynote on the need for reforming research assessment.

AND AGAIN: www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u... Nottingham confirmed these contracts were with Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Ovid/Wolters Kluwer, Taylor & Francis and Wiley. "the truly important thing is not to dress up austerity as the reason that we go to OA"

GULF: I am lucky enough to be a member of the first cohort of the OpenAIRE Open Science Training Policy Programme. This evening is day two of Sprint 1. These Science Europe survey results scienceeurope.org/our-resource... just underline how far behind Australia is on this thinking

And it's all (apparently) about the AI/Research synergies 🤢provided by the "proprietary content"*. I'm so TIRED. *scholar and researcher IP handed over for free #scholcomms #scholarlycommunication #academicsky #publishing

CALL OUT - a technical question. Anyone out there who is using Article Galaxy Scholar integrated with LibKey Nomad? We are having issues where two different DOIs for the same article (eg: an 'international' one & a 'local' one) are being interpreted as two articles. Is this your set up get in touch

BIZARRE NAME: This 'product'? 'service'? is called World Brain Scholar www.world-brain-scholar.eu & apparently uses AI for manuscript processing. FAQs are revealing. AI can't replace humans in peer review - but this is completely scalable. Skirting the hallucination issue. Washes hands of copyright.

PACMAN GAME: in the latest episode, Wiley has acquired Emerald Publishing Limited from Cambridge Information Group (CIG) in an all-cash transaction valued at £337 million, or USD 452 million. newsroom.wiley.com/press-releas...

HUH? On my LinkedIn feed was an ad to nominate myself for an honorary doctorate. When I clicked on the 'Apply Now' button it opened a pre completed form consisting of my name & phone no with a 'submit' button. Apparently that is all it takes (except maybe some $$ further down the line?) DODGY!

This LLM fueled scam has been hitting lots and lots of authors I follow, example:

🔴 We’ve now indexed just over 23,000 journals. 🟡 Thank you to the community who makes this possible: our DOAJ team and Board members, Ambassadors, volunteer editors, supporters - and of course, all the journals that are and apply to be indexed 🟢 #open #global #trusted 🔵 doaj.org

And we are live! Massive thanks to everyone who contributed to this. Reading your posts made me so much madder than I ever knew was possible

Another reason to distrust journal-based citation metrics: "Suspected #papermill articles…cited – and were cited by – other suspected paper mill articles…The resulting citations…measurably inflated journal citation metrics." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #Citations #JIF #ScholComm

INITIATIVE: katinamagazine.org/content/arti... key feature of model is FAIR² Data Article, a peer-reviewed publication format describing a single dataset. The intention is to give datasets a level of scholarly recognition comparable to conventional research articles

SAME POINT about poisoning the well. From The Brief issue 87 - Rescinding? www.ce-strategy.com/the-brief/re...

WELL PUT: upstream.force11.org/why-institut... A transactional model ties cost to individual acts of use. A collective model ties support to sustaining shared capacity. That distinction is not just financial. It shapes whether institutions can confidently encourage adoption

🌍 We’re pleased to welcome our new ambassador in Kenya, Michael Situma! We look forward to supporting Michael as he connects with his local community to raise awareness about our work, promote best practices & provide tools to support #OABook publishing. Join us in welcoming him to the cohort!👏

SEEKING interest from Australasian colleagues for scientific committee for Geneva Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication oai.events I have been on this committee for many years now & am stepping back to an advisory role. We need new ideas & energy from the antipodes! DM me if interested

Enjoying the research culture of people acknowledging all the different types of researchers that have supported their career when acknowledging their newly minted FRS status. With zero mention of any types of research enabling staff. Sigh.

I thought I'd get maybe 25 replies to this request and use two or three of them. We're now at 1400. The column, which is 4600 words long (blame yourselves), is finished, but this thread should be studied by future historians. No era has ever been as utterly annoyed, as molecularly fed up, as we are

And if you want my take on how recent changes in the fitness industry mirror what is happening in research see my LinkedIn post - www.linkedin.com/posts/dannyk...

ADVICE for Australian authors wanting to use a Read and Publish deal to cover OA costs - use your institutional address! www.linkedin.com/pulse/publis...

ALARMING: we are deskilling our up and coming researchers with uncritical adoption of AI www.nature.com/articles/d41...

YEP - I have seen this first hand at multiple institutions across different evaluation systems link.springer.com/article/10.1...

SILENCED: a good analysis of how the emphasis, tone, and moral weight are redistributed when lived experiences are 'translated' by AI scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/05/21/g...

COURSE: Open Scholarship Training: Fundamentals of Open Scholarship centerforopenscience.catalog.instructure.com/courses/fund...

NO SECRETS: I am applauding Cornell University's position on non-disclosure clauses www.library.cornell.edu/libraries/po...

COME ALONG: 10th FORCE11 Scholarly Communications Institute! Jul 27-31 Theme: Critical Thinking & Evolving Open Scholarship in the Era of AI My class: "Open as Antidote - addressing the big challenges facing science". Register tinyurl.com/y7aaata4 Scholarships avail tinyurl.com/yc4r4zd7 #FORCE11

EXCITED to be part of this Opening Keynote Panel for Open Repositories 2026 #openrepos on 9th June at 10pm AEST. If you want to register go here or2026.openrepositories.org (it is free!)

man, university libraries are amazing. you can just ask them to help get some obscure thing and they're like "doing that is actually our job, not only are we good at it but also we are excited to make this happen for you"

Not the first, won't be the last. I strongly believe the days of "transformative agreements" are numbered. But those seeing this as the end of open access are doom-mongers, plenty of other routes, and as they have a rights retention policy may I suggest green OA?

RINGS TRUE www.infodocket.com/2026/05/14/n... * Leaders operating under sustained financial & staffing constraints. * Most confident in ability to articulate library’s value proposition, fewer believe this value is recognized by senior administrators * Investments in OA initiatives have declined

Looking forward to speaking with colleagues in Australasia about our vision at the @ojcollective.bsky.social to build a sustainable future for diamond open access publishing!

ANALYSIS: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/05/14/a... arguing that funder mandates are not being complied to bc a % of funded papers are in subscription only journals. But how many APCs of these papers are in their institutional repositories? Green OA is a mechanism to comply for many funders.