Todays best echidna… it’s a small juvenile that was scuttling about on the side of the road.

“Critics say automatic subscriptions to online course materials are a commercial cash grab that limits students’ choices”. Fun fact: In Australia students who can’t afford to rent, sometimes can’t use the library e-book in exams due to licence restrictions. universityaffairs.ca/features/dig...

I mean, that quote seems to indicate that Clarivate has no agency in the embedding. These tools are being actively added to products by without the option of turning them off. Here's a thought. Maybe get the products right before releasing them like an untested virus into the scholarly environment?

REFERENCE to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) by @oapenbooks.bsky.social Niels Stern at #OASPA2025 open book panel - using as a mechanism for structuring the panel discussion around Introductions, Governance, Impact & Quality and Sustainability openscholarlyinfrastructure.org

MISERABLE GHOSTS - bloody university rankings follow everything around like a bad smell

“AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor,” said Adio Dinika, a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute based in Bremen, Germany. “These raters are the middle rung: invisible, essential and expendable.” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

UPDATED: Retracted guidelines from COPE now updated to include what to do with AI issues publicationethics.org/guidance/gui...

STATEMENT: Time to stop the undermining of library rights: IFLA statement on contract override www.ifla.org/news/time-to... The Statement ... calls on governments to protect limitations and exceptions ... & look at how to ensure libraries benefit from effective protections against unfair contracts

In our last editorial we imagined how bad academic publishing might get, and hopefully how it might come out better www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

My publisher let me know and you know what? Hell yeah.

“An ad blocker installed in a browser, Springer maintained, infringed on its copyright by modifying that Web page program without permission”. Hmm-modifying a copyright work needs permission? Let’s turn that around, when Springer produce AI generated versions of academic work.

'Wiley executed a “landmark" $20 million AI licensing project with a large tech company that included content from other publishers and also struck a “strategic partnership with Anthropic to accelerate AI integration across scholarly research."' Afraid this will only encourage them further.

"As the NIH weighs these options, it remains debatable whether capping APCs is the most effective way to rein in unreasonable publishing fees or if such caps risk acting as a band-aid on symptoms rather than curing the underlying disease of profit-making that is plaguing scholarly publishing."

Case in point irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/a...

You can now download the book on the publisher's website: press.umich.edu/Books/P/Publ... (open access of course)

Thrilled that my article with @markpmckenna.bsky.social on "Amazon's Quiet Overhaul of the Trademark System" is now out in the California Law Review @califlrev.bsky.social

“The internet hasn't caused us to fall from a state of auratic grace. It's just accreted one more medium to the media, channeling media, channeling media that have always serialized originals (and yes, this precedes the printing press)” sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...

HEY friends: recently seen heaps of "disclosures" from AI companies of the energy cost per question you type into chatbots (most recently from Google)? Presenting per-query 'efficiency' is part of big tech's efforts to hide its extremely real and happening-right-now climate impacts! NEW POST -->>>

Anyone interested in question of whether government should pay for article processing charges might like to read this: grants.nih.gov/grants/guide... and respond to this survey: osp.od.nih.gov/comment-form... #publishers #APC #research

Happy this is happening, hope to see many of you IP and IP related nerds online!

Jisc and UUK seeking 5-15% price reductions from Big 5 publishers – Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley and Sage. The negotiations, which are not going well, conclude on 29 August. If they fail, several universities may be walking away from their current deals, losing access in 2026.

Incisive commentary by one of our most respected historians of Australia. Bottom line: “Australia has the second-lowest public expenditure on tertiary education institutions in the OECD after Britain.”

Many progressives think Open Science is a good thing but it has an ambiguous stance re IP. Here is @kathybowrey.bsky.social's critical intellectual property scholarship's angle on Open Science on @ishtip.bsky.social youtube page. ⬇️

The Commerce Department threatening to take over Harvard's patents shows the extent to which the federal government is trying to pressure the university into a settlement. They are trying everything possible. (gift link)

We previously documented a paper mill offering a variety of services, including selling thousands of design registrations as "patents" to Indian academics hoping to pad their CVs. Exploitation of intellectual property systems for the manipulation of academic reputations doi.org/10.1007/s409...

“The Opinion focuses on the flaws in key provisions aimed at balancing copyright and research needs: the general InfoSoc Directive research exception, the text and data mining exception of the CDSM Directive and national secondary publication rights.” legalblogs.wolterskluwer.com/copyright-bl...

very much looking forward to convening this workshop with my colleague Wanshu Cong in just two short weeks - hopefully to lead to many more conversations on an international law for another technology. law.anu.edu.au/news-and-eve...

“with changes to copyright laws, [fair use and TDM] Australia could provide much of South-East Asia's rapidly expanding data storage needs.” www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07...

We should keep asking- why no Australian AI copyright class actions, where zero fair use arguments for AI apply? A sure bet investment for a litigation funder. infojustice.org/archives/46532

“The aim of this article is to map the current structure of scholarly publishing in terms of corporate control, its disciplinary and geographic distribution, and the adoption of OA, thus providing an update on the state of the oligopoly of commercial publishers.”

📣 If you miss interdisciplinary conversations about IP from the past few days, don’t fret … Pls join us for the online seminar critical IP perspectives on Open Science with Kathy Bowrey @kathybowrey.bsky.social next Monday. Info ⬇️

BIG NEWS: The whole scholarly publishing environment is experiencing a huge amount of disruption. It’s a good time to rethink the whole enterprise. The catalyst is not what we would have asked for but the result is a big opportunity- the system has been broken for a while. Let’s fix it.

“This article shows how interlibrary loan, conceived as a form of academic traffic, played a crucial role in postwar reconstruction efforts, facilitating the xchg of resources + info among libraries… [It] focuses on the elaborate procedures librarians developed to create union catalogs.”

www.theguardian.com/technology/2... I proposed a "right to your face" back in 2019. Interesting to see where this goes. Public interest exceptions will be challenging..

Q: What’s more hilarious than a predatory website turning my article into an #AI generated podcast without my consent? A: The fact that the article BEGAN as a podcast made by me & @elinorcarmi.bsky.social. So basically glaciers were melted to turn our podcast into a worse podcast. #academicChatter

📢 Joint ISHTIP/Warwick Law School online seminar with Kathy Bowrey @kathybowrey.bsky.social who will provide a critical IP perspective on the Open Science Movement 🕰️ 30 June 2025, 1-2pm (London), online ❗Registration: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/warwick-la... ℹ️ Info: ishtip.org/open-science...

Today!

Follow up to my Q a while back about 'why isn't stolen slop genAI music as big an issue as writing/images' - thanks to @kaygeeuk.bsky.social who alerted me and then these stories now appearing in my timeline. Turns out it is an issue.

Libraries can’t archive digital subs like we did with print because we have no ownership rights. One of the endless knock-on effects from the lack of digital ownership and the Spotification of digital scholarly content. 🤷‍♀️

ROUNDTABLE on Intellectual Property and Industrial Property (in the Era of Trump) Wellcome Collection, London | 19 June | 3:30-5pm GMT In-person and online & open to public With @mbarber.bsky.social @kathybowrey.bsky.social @70sbachchan.bsky.social Vitor Ido, Svitlana Lebendeko, Caoimhe Ring, me

Save the date in London: Roundtable on Intellectual Property and Industrial Policy (in the Era of Trump) 19 June 2025 | 3:30-5pm | Wellcome Trust, Euston Road Organised as part of British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship project 'IP and the Role of the State in Industrial Policy' 1/3

I think Springer Nature are saying here— would you like to help us claim copyright by pretending to author and authenticating this AI text?

It is with profound sadness that we learned about the passing of our beloved friend, colleague, and mentor, Mario Biagioli. Mario was a pre-eminent scholar in many fields of inquiry: history of science, science studies, media studies, and the interdisciplinary study of intellectual properties. 1/2

“The AI disaster is getting worse—and a new survey of 48,000 people in 47 countries makes clear that the public is fed up”. Good reflection here on jobs, copyright and AI-“you can cheat on anything” open.substack.com/pub/tedgioia...

This is going to be 🔥

"Overlooked in the outrage over Perlmutter's firing is that Congress, *with the support of the publishing industry,* voted to hand the Copyright Office over to Trump in 2017" [emphasis ours]. Didn't pass, but... www.wordsandmoney.com/after-trump-...