Deceptive and misleading conduct perhaps to suggest human authorship based on user engagement? youtu.be/9pqlwQaOTvU

New article on regulation of research misconduct in Australia www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

“Cameron’s strategy was extraction …He took the unique biometric facial features of a 14-year-old Indigenous girl, ran them through an industrial production process and generated billions of dollars in profit without ever once asking her permission.That is theft.” www.theguardian.com/film/2026/ma...

"Therein lies the déjà vu, and the risk that when 2029 arrives with a new mandate, it will find us still having the same conversations about underpowered repositories, unaffordable BPCs, insufficient Diamond capacity, and ambivalent authors." @heroicendeavour.eurosky.social on OA book policies.

New NHMRC/MRFF Open Science Policy is a bit weak in open data- but if the ambition is to keep down Australian drug prices “When trial data becomes public, it creates prior art that can block subsequent patents related to the drug.” ip.jotwell.com/clinical-tri...

Ryan Ruby's incandescent and no-truth-spared review of the reissue of Edward Said's Representations of the Intellectual: "Toward the end of his life, Edward Said liked to call himself the last Jewish intellectual. It is an excellent and, I’m tempted to say, quintessentially Jewish joke."

An important paper in which Katia describes the limitations of seeing the AI ecosystem exclusively through the lens of enclosure, & why “foreclosure” may be more illuminating. By being Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, AI manages to foreclose the ability to be understood, scrutinized & contested.

Once academics were told to upload teaching materials to digital learning platforms, universities and tech firms alike were always going to monetize it. Now AI is being used to amplify the assetization of those digital archives of academic content. codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2026/04/29/a...

"Funding will continue to support transitional agreements, but from 2028/29 UKRI funding will focus on fully OA publishing and will no longer be available for hybrid OA." Pretty big open access policy update from UKRI. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

This ebook publishing and libraries report is good. It misses looking at author royalty rates for ebooks(lower than hard copies and hasn’t shifted as ebooks became the norm); or open publishing models which are increasingly platform based and vulnerable in the same way as proprietary ebooks

DENMARK AND FRANCE 🇩🇰🇫🇷 bans all Microsoft products from all public offices. The phaseout is expected to be completed before autumn 2026. Their products are being replaced with customer versions of Linux and LibreOffice. This is digital sovereignty being taken back

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

"For years, a handful of Big Tech companies have used their power to gain control of the UK’s digital infrastructure, locking the government into wasteful contracts and shaping tech policy in their favour." 🗣️ ORG's @jim.killock.org.uk on our new report calling for UK Digital Sovereignty.

“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.”

This is a comprehensive investigation of patent abuse of a Keytruda & the best I've ever seen patent data visualisation of evergreening practices and the resulting thicket until 2046 - another extra twenty years of patent monopoly right h/t @clancyny.bsky.social

The Supreme Court's Cox v. Sony Music ruling is three weeks old. It's already being cited to defend an AI video generator that produces Darth Vader on demand. Full story, up now on Copyright Lately: copyrightlately.com/cox-v-sony-m...

'As anthropologists, we have been conducting ethnographic research since 2022 on how research culture is understood and experienced within the intricate ecosystem of universities.' Smart piece this: worth a read. 1/2

UK AI policy recs by CREATe—creators (who contract with large content firms) and users (who contract with large digital platforms) need to be separated from industrial interests of AI with different policy measures; but all areas intersect around Research exceptions www.create.ac.uk/blog/2026/03...

“You might even go so far as to say that Sora was a crude, funhouse mirror-refracted vision of the world Silicon Valley is struggling to birth. Let’s not forget that most people who encountered it found it repulsive.” www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ais-aesthe...

Australia’s arts and culture cannot be produced overseas, and cannot be moved offshore. It can only be made here. Read the full piece on The Point: https://theaus.in/4s0JjV2

What would you do to prove you're a real researcher who did the work? My pitch for leaving online breadcrumbs whilst we work medianwatch.netlify.app/post/breadcr...

The point about intergenerational process, training up a next generation of humans, needs a lot more attention and thought. In the short term, will publishers, like universities, turn increasingly to vivas to assess authorship?

Nancy Fraser: “On the colonisation of the lifeworld, I felt that, in essentialising the system/lifeworld distinction, Habermas masked historically specific forms of male domination and missed the transformative potential of feminist movements.”

Nice longread about clock making history @corbeijersbergen.bsky.social

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

I always had the vague feeling that Scientific Reports and Nature Communications are mainly APC business models. A paper estimated the total APC for gold/hybrid Open Access per journal 2015–2018: doi.org/10.1162/qss_... Surprise, surprise - there are 2 outliers at the top😐

new jawn from me out today in economy & society on the "subscription economy," part of my larger project on *the paywall society* www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Here is a PhD position in arts law at UNSW investigating AI, copyright and the private regulation of creativity. You'll work with the fantastic @kathybowrey.bsky.social and Louise Buckingham from the Arts Law Centre of Australia, wider team myself and Marie Hadley. www.unsw.edu.au/law-justice/...

The UK gvt report on copyright and AI came out yesterday. It’s a step into the right direction, away from initial proposal of default of copyright exemption for training models, but it is hopelessly delusional about the supposed benefits of AI on jobs and public interest.

Hi Friends- I have a PHD scholarship working with the Arts Law Centre of Australia. Please help circulate: www.unsw.edu.au/law-justice/...

😬

Just a small blood moon rising last night.

Gotta love how academic books don't earn you money, but LLMs can make money off of stealing them in the aggregate and if you write enough, they can also profit from stealing your personality after you are dead.

Much of my work in meta-research is on finding problems in research, so I've seen a lot of bad practices. However, even I was shocked by hundreds of researchers publishing papers using data that is faked and has no data provenance. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6.... Amazing work by my student Alex.

This is why we need our institutions to help enforce our moral rights : against false attribution. It should not just be the busy work of academics to tidy up likely AI generated corruption retractionwatch.com/2026/02/27/r...

I'd appreciate if any audio tech folks could help circulate this exciting call for a fully-funded PhD position working in multichannel audio design for galleries. It's part of an ARC funded project 'From Noise to Signal: Improving Sonic Experiences in the Gallery' www.unsw.edu.au/research/hdr...

Our universities have to stop normalizing theft out our IP….

Sydney STS folks 👋 Join us for the inaugural event of the Sydney STS Network (Friday 27 Feb) where a panel will respond to the prompt: Why (Australian) STS now? #STS

Waiting to see how the copyright mess is untangled… it’s an offence to import technology that would have infringed if made here- so AI and the civil service adoption of AI really is in a spot. www.crikey.com.au/2026/02/19/o...

The "AI revolution" in science is going so smoothly that my instititutional library is having to deploy multiple technical protection measures against "poorly behaved Gen AI crawling" just to maintain its timely service library.ed.ac.uk/research-sup...

Another story where you realise that absolutely no one has any idea how to deal with all the AI papers being cranked out. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

NOR US! Another three UK universities decline new Elsevier deal www.timeshighereducation.com/news/three-m... - Sheffield, Lancaster and Surrey confirm they are walking away from proposed three-year deal with world’s largest academic publisher. (paywalled sorry)

Been asked to discuss this tomorrow with Law Faculty: Should we “normalise AI-use” in the teaching of students or in our research? There is no research it’s fit for purpose. Even Anthropic says “If you don’t do the work, you don’t learn, and you don’t remember.” pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/06/a...

Government used AI to summarize expert reports from its AI consult. I did the same by uploading them to Chat GPT/Perplexity AI to generate new summaries. I found the government consistently softened advice creating an illusion of consensus that isn’t really there. www.michaelgeist.ca/2026/02/aico...

It’s good to get out and about

Brilliant reporting here by Gareth Hutchens on the Atlas Network and its insidious work across the world, including Australia www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01...

New paper- LLMs allow verbatim extraction of copyrighted works. "For Claude 3.7 Sonnet, we were able to extract four whole books near-verbatim, including two books under copyright in the U.S.: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and 1984" arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02671

INSPIRING: How Two Canadian Organizations Created a National Model for Diamond Open Access katinamagazine.org/content/arti... “The final piece of the Canadian diamond OA puzzle is a nationwide network of library publishing programs hosted in university libraries."