"We presented a new problem posed by Open Access agreements: the phenomenon of value extraction, whereby institutional APC coverage for publication in major journals is leveraged to secure authorship in the absence of substantive intellectual contribution"

"Medical data from 500,000 volunteers in the UK has been put up for sale on a Chinese website following a data breach" giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

BROKEN www.timeshighereducation.com/news/loss-fa... Who knew that throwing money at publishers would not result in them changing their profit seeking activities? Yes this is inconvenient but something needs to change (again).

NEEDED to support Diamond OA in Oz - theconversation.com/so-much-rese... *unis recognise editor work in workload models *funding bodies incl the ARC introduce direct support for diamond *research assessment policies stop favouring international prestige *uni libraries coordinate efforts to support

HMMM "Elsevier, as a strategic partner of the 4th Generation University community" www.researchinformation.info/analysis-opi... Bandwagons, anyone? I am too old and cynical to think this anything other than a new mechanism to leverage investment in Elsevier products.

THIRD SPACE: the people who work in research but not credited www.nature.com/articles/d41... I agree - my 2022 coauthored similar argument in Nature Careers "Time to re-think the divide between academic and support staff" www.nature.com/articles/d41... OA - repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/ob...

ALMOST ATAVISTIC: the trend in tables to use blue and white striping (example here of fictional uni presented at a Digital Science day). It reminds me of the computer paper with the holes down the sides my dad would bring home from CSIRO for my brother and I to draw on.

MILESTONE: 100K papers published under CAUL R&P deals. I disagree with the expression 'saved' about the funds. We know that if there had to be a payment the choice would be that many of those articles would not have been made OA. 'APC cost avoided' is more accurate. But still - a big achievement!

QUESTION: In Australia we are having trouble with our R&P deals because about 10% of authors don't use their institutional email address. It causes issues with verifying if a paper is eligible. Has anyone done any work on this issue - why do authors use personal emails when submitting papers?

Research integrity IS research security. Not a nice-to-have — it's foundational. My latest blog explores the cracks in science's ecosystem that go way deeper than #ResearchSecurity.

MORE CUTS proposed in US: www.nature.com/articles/d41... prohibit the spending of “Federal funds for expensive subscriptions to academic journals and prohibitively high publishing costs unless required by Federal statute or approved in advance by a Federal agency”.

UNFIXABLE: Does the AI business model have a fatal flaw? www.reuters.com/technology/d... LLMs are inherently probabilistic, not deterministic. They try to guess the answer that sounds best not the objectively correct one And that’s not a problem to be fixed. It’s fundamental to how these models work

Good piece. “If your problem with open access is that commercial publishers are hoovering up all the money, design open access interventions that specifically prevent commercial publishers from receiving your money.”

THORNY: "we inhabit a continually shifting, lawless terrain, where ethics and integrity are at constant risk of being sacrificed for the benefit of productivity and commodity. The onus falls to us—the publisher—to put in place guidance on the acceptable and responsible use of generative AI"

MERGER in Australia likely (again) www.timeshighereducation.com/news/univers... "The cost-benefit study ... was due with the government by the end of last year but reportedly delivered late. Neither it nor the 2023 review that preceded it ... has been released publicly."

IT'S FINE - nothing to see here.....

READ THIS ARTICLE! "It’s almost as if the uncritical and naive adoption of AI has made us more credulous and sapped our critical thinking at the precise moment we should be on guard against its evolving harms." "To put it another way: LLMs are structurally indifferent to truth.”

SUPPORT OPEN INFRASTRUCTURE: makedatacount.org/read-our-blo... “openness is not only about access, but about long-term reliability, interoperability, trust, and sovereignty... continuity and control cannot be guaranteed without infrastructure that is governed with public interest as its core"

We are now OA Forward! ⏩ OA2020 has evolved into OA Forward, uniting with ESAC under new international governance, to advance the next stage of open scholarly communication. Read the full announcement: oa2020.org/2026/04/08/i... #openaccess #scholcomm

ADVICE - noting a PhD is to develop independent scientific expertise: learning to think critically, analyze data, write clearly, and form your own judgment. When AI automates those cognitive tasks, trainees can produce polished outputs while bypassing the learning process those tasks provide.

GREAT SUMMARY: "The ABCs of Diamond OA" from Malavika Legge from @oaspa.bsky.social summarising the third global summit on Diamond OA held in February in Bengaluru katinamagazine.org/content/arti...

HERE WE GO - scary story about AI bots www.malwarebytes.com/blog/ai/2026... "here’s the worry: what happens when AI agents decide to up the ante, becoming more aggressive with their attacks on people? Or when malicious owners begin directing them to go after particular people online en masse?"

GREAT NEWS - it is excellent to see our Aotearoa colleagues doing the lifting with open activities!

BEYOND PLAGIARISM theconversation.com/plagiarised-... iThenticate found 8% match from her paper, but the problem was much deeper "when someone reproduces a reflexive memo and presents it as their own, that isn’t about claiming someone else’s ideas; they’re claiming someone else’s experiences."

APPROACH This is from the US (so not necessarily relevant in other jurisdictions) but it is very interesting: osf.io/preprints/so... Addressing Legal Uncertainties in Article Versions and Institutional Copyright Policies to Support Immediate Public Access to Federal Grant-Funded Publications

SPECTACULAR - I don't think I could try and write this badly: "Also, hot from electric and warm from move make more hot, so need in work like earth heat take, oil get, and hot change machine in hole thing." Part of me loves this. The rest of me is terrified. How long do you think we have left?

UPHILL BATTLE for Diamond OA scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/04/02/g... "actual publishing choices continue to be shaped by career incentives, reputation, and visibility rather than a deliberate commitment to community-owned infrastructures or long-term sustainability."

CRUK goes green [OA] news.cancerresearchuk.org/2026/04/01/w...

DEPRESSING: Just found this piece I co-authored in 2012 theconversation.com/finch-inquir... "Finch inquiry’s open access tune won’t resonate in Australia". The situation has barely changed here in Australia in the last fourteen years. I am starting to give up hope TBH

ARTICLE: How Graduate Students Engage with Open Access: Challenges and Interventions www.iastatedigitalpress.com/jlsc/article... "Conclusion: Graduate students, as the next generation of authors, are not prepared to make decisions about OA for their articles."

Ten Years of Glossa: A Decade of Diamond Open Access in Linguistics - Open Library of Humanities https://www.openlibhums.org/news/930/

Oh so now copyright matters.

JUST ASK - if you are in an institution, ask the procurement/finance people for a report based on *supplier names* to get a sense of how deeply you are in with some of these companies. Group all the different names for one company together (eg: RELX/Elsevier/LexisNexis etc). It is enlightening.

I do think this is a good development, especially if it's coupled with active community engagement to encourage researchers to publish. Moving away from commercial infrastructure was crucial too.

WELL DONE: scoss.org/australian-l... some support from Australian libraries for open infrastructure

POSITION: "A true European Research Area (ERA) needs a Secondary Publishing Right and support for rights retention policies" knowledgerights21.org/rights-reten... This is because "Traditional copyright practices are a barrier to open knowledge sharing"

HMMM: “The logic and the writing and the thinking throughout the whole paper didn’t all fit together beautifully,” he notes. Further issues included hallucinated references, duplicated figures and a lack of methodological rigor. Says a fair bit about the 'peer review' here.

MESSY - arguments about over OA for books, but there is some cognitive dissonance. Increase in access from IRs from 2mil in 2020 to 3.5mil in 2024, but academics don't want to use IRs because IR contents are 'not very discoverable'.... www.timeshighereducation.com/news/strateg...

Wikipedia does what is essentially a full ban on AI content: www.404media.co/wikipedia-ba...

UPDATE: www.arc.gov.au/news-and-pub... including "Journal articles and conference papers must be made openly accessible immediately upon publication"

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?

WRONG FOCUS wonkhe.com/blogs/an-acc... "The model has long treated the production of a thing as the symbol of learning. AI has made it trivially easy to produce the thing without any of the learning." AI means "The learning outcome becomes a formatting problem." Weird thumbnail unrelated to story

PRE POISON: theconversation.com/using-your-a... There are even tools available to help simplify that process, including one created by Australian artist Tega Brain “that will only return content created before ChatGPT’s first public release on November 30 2022” Avoiding rubbish AI has fed back in

ANALYSIS of Elsevier's response to attempts to open access to US federally funded research katinamagazine.org/content/arti... "in this response, Elsevier ignores the value of research itself and of researchers’ labor in designing, implementing, and constructing a cogent narrative around a project."

Strong statement from UCU on principles for implementing AI in teaching, research and administration. This is much more reflective and comprehensive than the pervasive catch-all of 'responsible AI'. www.ucu.org.uk/media/15656/...

SHARED PRINCIPLES for evaluation of OA monograph models from @rluk.ac.uk www.rluk.ac.uk/shared-princ...

AI POLICE: www.authorsalliance.org/2026/03/16/l... "Libraries ... can ensure that institutions, researchers, and communities they serve have a seat at the table—not by withholding access, but by building the infrastructure that supports open, accountable research of every kind."

THOUGHT PROVOKING: katinamagazine.org/content/arti... This piece talks about where and how AI can be involved in archives but also considers some of the reactions expected of archivists

⭐ A very warm welcome to new members of the OAA Executive Committee announced at the March 19 AGM - and a huge thank you to outgoing executive members whose contributions have significantly progressed the #OpenAccess agenda in Australasia ⭐ Details: oaaustralasia.org/executive-co...

RESOURCE: www.opened.org/posts/2026/n... Open Education Association new resource: the Hot Off the Press Publication Tracker - highlights recently published open textbooks, reports, research, and major publications related to open education.