arXiv to spin out as an independent non-profit. They are seeking a CEO jobs.chronicle.com/job/37961678...

"The only way to address the reliance on a journal’s brand as a proxy for quality was to take a recognized signifier and destroy that signification." Nice piece. I still have so much respect for eLife's decision to jeopardise its prestige in order to show that journal prestige is bad for science.

Dear everyone, As per the post from the Bodleian librarian below, AI bots and scrapers are putting just about every website under great pressure, British History Online included. A lot of excellent tech staff are working hard to keep everything working, but outages and siruptions are inevitable.

I would add many times these products are objectively bad. The supporting librarian either isnt aware or will excuse it by saying "oh the vendor is so responsive, Im sure they will fix it eventually"

🏆 Become a Data Champion at the University of Cambridge! Passionate about good research data practices? Learn more and share knowledge to help support researchers with research data management and publishing research outputs. ⏰Apply by 31 March 2026. 🔗 https://loom.ly/JyoKs8Q

Thomson Reuters is best known for its media outlet and legal research tools, but it is also a huge data broker that provides investigative tools to the government, including ICE. Its Minneapolis workers aren't happy about that: www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/t...

How fascinating. Because they started this s*** in August. And suddenly, within a week, they deactivate it. Quite the sign of how experts don't actually use Grammarly and thus hadn't noticed until last week? And how stressed Grammarly is about potential law suits now that we do realise.

NEW REVENUE MODEL - I admire the creativity shown here.

MISDIRECTION - a story about India's choice to spend the equivalent of its research budget on subscription costs to commercial publishers. Some public institutions don't have reliable internet - meaning many academics can't access the articles researchonresearchinstitute.substack.com/p/why-metasc...

📚 Meet Danny Kingsley, DOAB Ambassador for Australia 🇦🇺 Danny shares insights on the global open books landscape, why local expertise matters, and the growing need to support open infrastructure in scholarly communication. 🔗 Read the interview: buff.ly/zPPDTHT #OA #OAbooks #OpenScience #DOAB

- the government’s mixed public messaging on AI & copyright is hindering licensing - the government should make a clear public statement that AI companies operating in the UK need to license their training data (which is the law) 4/5

The use of impact factors in the evaluation of researchers has contributed to the distortion of scientific publishing practices and research practices, noted France's CNRS as it walked away from Web of Science, using $$$ saved to promote #OpenScience & #OpenData. www.cnrs.fr/en/update/cn...

We're especially looking for folks experienced in records management, metadata standards, & digital preservation. Most state records these days are digital. If you like the challenge of how a government preserves, organizes, & makes accessible its vast digital self, this'd be a great fit.

EVERYTHING IS FINE! I don’t know what the problem is here. Universities *want* to give money to commercial publishers while free riding on open infrastructure. Stop complaining.

ANALOGY in fitness industry: as we dumbed down choreography we deskilled participants - the future instructors coming through the system. Now all anyone can teach is a single exercise repeated for 30 secs. The ability to choreograph or make training mentally interesting is dying, soon lost.

LOSS: what happens when you get exact answers for your query? Losing stumbling upon something else. scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/03/05/g... "... frictionless research processes do not reflect the reality of academic inquiry & will not prepare the next generation of researchers to engage in it"

My first paper had to be mailed to Stockholm, Sweden, and then mailed to reviewers around the world. Everything by mail! It was submitted, reviewed, revised, typeset, and published in 3 months. I feel bad for early-career scientists who can't find a single reviewer after 5 months. It's gotta change.

NOT GREAT: "The data paints a picture of an industry in defensive mode — cautious, structurally stressed, but not in freefall. Scholarly communications faces a genuinely difficult 2026" scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/03/02/e... Interesting perspectives on AI too - mostly remediation of impact

SMOKE & MIRRORS more & more we seem to be using forklifts to lift weights in the gym when the point is not that the weights move up & down. The point in the gym is that the muscles doing the lifting get stronger. (Note - as a fitness instructor I can always find a fitness analogy for schol comm)

RESONATES across discussions w sector colleagues "Recent conversations around AI in higher ed highlight how librarians are feeling an obligation to learn more about AI while at the same time being left out of important institutional conversations" scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/03/04/g...

GLOW-UP: the branding of both DOAB and OAPEN have been updated and if I say so myself* they are looking pretty good! @doabooks.bsky.social + @oapenbooks.bsky.social (*Disclosure - I act as a voluntary Ambassador for the organisations) www.doabooks.org/en/article/d...

In the first of a series of interviews with leaders from SCOSS-funded open infrastructure organizations, we asked about their perspectives on open infrastructure for open science. @scossfunding.bsky.social @datadryad.bsky.social @researchdataall.bsky.social 👉 makedatacount.org/read-our-blo...

It seems easier for academic institutions to hand over billions to commercial publishers than for them to give small amounts to scholar led presses #CopimConference

RLUK is delighted to publish the Developing Inclusive Collections guide on reflective practice, providing a framework for colleagues at all career stages This guide is useful to those working or aiming to work in collection-based decolonisation + build on existing knowledge+skills bit.ly/INC-COLL

Have you noticed something different? We're delighted to unveil our new look! Fun and friendly, we hope you enjoy interacting with a refreshed DOAB. Read all about it in this press release: doabooks.org/en/article/d...

This is one of the most reasoned & persuasive arguments for not allowing LLMs anywhere near reading & writing intensive classrooms. We can 100% choose not to outsource our reading & writing labor to a bot, and model for our students why they should do the same. #EduSky www.tue.nl/en/our-unive...

NOT WRONG: katinamagazine.org/content/arti... "Why Stevan Harnad Has Been Dreaming of Chatbots All Along" - two reasons why green OA didn't take off - 1. Academics couldn't be bothered sharing their work and 2. Librarians obsessed over copyright

Much of this (clearly AI-generated) post is terrifying and probably true re jobs. LLMs are going to unleash all economic hell. But to claim that "knowledge is essentially free now" is nonsense. New knowledge cannot be synthesised just from all that is. True new knowledge has a labour cost.

In support of #OpenScience, we routinely ask authors to openly share their #research #code before publication. We are now formalizing this practice with a mandatory #CodeSharing policy and clarifying what we mean by code sharing.

Repost if your account is a safe space for the trans community. 🏳️‍⚧️

AGREED - see outcome of a study looking at whether monographs are being used for T&L katinamagazine.org/content/arti...

IMPORTANT POINT: Framing AI as a 'tool' makes AI’s role in actively shaping our thoughts harder to see. We stop asking important questions about the moral responsibilities of the companies and programmers that design and market these systems. www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/gene...

WATCH my presentation as part of a Sidney Martin Library Open Access Week Webinar to the University of the West Indies. Held online 21 October 2026, I talked about: “It’s publishing, but not as we knew it”. youtu.be/0_4ErfMBV0s

USE PEOPLE NOT AI - www.nature.com/articles/d41... Those people might themselves use AI but librarians are specialists at finding and organising information and they don't hallucinate citations...

ARGUMENT: metaror.org/article/prep... "Preprint review services: Disrupting the scholarly communication landscape?" for future ways of leveraging preprints is timely given the new NHMRC/MRFF Open Science Policy which accepts preprints as mechanism for making work OA www.nhmrc.gov.au/about-us/res...

They still use 'Luddite' as a smear word, huh? Check out this history comic about the actual historical Luddites and what they were about thenib.com/im-a-luddite

OBSERVATION in a discussion about cancellations that the future of commercial publishers is cash flow through venture capital - they want us to keep producing content so they can sell it to a market (AI) that has a lot more money. The academic market is becoming the product rather than consumers.

The Researcher to Reader Conference is happening today and tomorrow. The official hashtag is #R2RConf - please use that. But you may encounter interesting content by also searching for #R2RConf2026 or #R2R2026 some other variant.

#R2RConf Ensures Long-term Future with SKS Knowledge Services The long-term future of Researcher to Reader Conference has been ensured by an agreement for the company that operates R2R to become part of SKS Knowledge Services. r2rconf.com/r2rnews/

IMAGINE if we redirected a small proportion of the funds we direct into profits of commercial organisations towards structured open infrastructure.... scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/02/18/g...

"In its mainstream form, Open Science explains the Global South’s slower research pace as a matter of weak infrastructure, low capacity, or scarce resources. Diversity and inclusion shrink to questions of representation while systemic issues vanish from view." Excellent from @batoolmm.bsky.social

PHILISTINES - that is the problem with relying on tech folks for preservation (who think it means a backup) '“I didn’t even know we had any clients like that,” a Microsoft product manager told me when I asked how she felt about protecting archives.' This is a fascinating & cleverly presented read

"For open infrastructure, the burden of AI harvesting is existential...a swarm of AI scrapers mirror entire collections, the cost of being open rises sharply...degraded performance for legitimate users, polluted metrics, staff time diverted to firefighting" www.digital-science.com/blog/2026/02...

REPORT: www.flinders.edu.au/research/art... “While promising operational efficiency, these innovations also introduce risks of algorithmic management, the erosion of tacit knowledge, digital incivility and the devaluation of human labour...” he warns.

MEASUREMENT - This article describes measurement of OA materials - a challenge as usage and provision changes katinamagazine.org/content/arti... 2020 saw temp removal of paywalls during the COVID-19 lockdown & the introduction of R&P agreements. Article considers these and identifies usage trends

PROS & CONS - (mostly pros) about Subscribe to Open explored here katinamagazine.org/content/arti...

AGREED! I discovered this several years ago when wanting to cite the Finch Report in a paper. I put a call out - someone located it on the Wayback machine for me. The Finch Report can be accessed in the APO repository apo.org.au/node/29938 I use this now as an example of the value of repositories.

SEE YA! www.cnrs.fr/en/update/cn... CNRS researchers are now encouraged to turn to open databases like OpenAlex. This offers > of visibility for non-English-language journals & a larger number of journals than WoS which was considered to be insufficiently representative for several disciplines.

Diamond Open Access won’t scale on volunteer heroics alone. It needs real institutional infrastructure, recognition, and long-term ownership. Read full article by @curtrice.bsky.social via @scholarlykitchen.bsky.social: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/02/18/g...

THIS!!! see my 2021 rant about the exploitation of our time by commercial organisations force11.org/post/the-uns... "... it is immensely frustrating to be approached by an extraordinarily profitable organisation to be asked to give my knowledge and expertise to them for free. ..."