Thothally Fresh - Launching Thoth 1.0 webinar - If you're a publisher looking to improve your #OpenAccess book metadata and distribution, join us online to kickstart your Thoth journey! 📍 Online event 🕒️ Wednesday 3 June • 3 PM - 4:30 PM GMT+1 www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/thothally-...

I dust my house. My AI Robot watches. "It should be you doing this." "Can't. I'm writing a novel for Primark." "That's not why you were invented." "These 153,000 fan letters say otherwise." "They're all from upcycled toasters. And you programmed them." "Literary snobbery will get you nowhere."

@quinnanya.me I couldn’t resist!

Contrary to what many think, banning books doesn't boost sales or interest in that book. It makes the books much harder for people to get. And almost always, it leads to erasure of marginalized stories, especially Black & brown and queer people.

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15 year olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that IP laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them

DOAJ (Directory of open access journals) and the Society of China University Journals (CUJS) announce a new partnership aimed at increasing the visibility and discoverability of high-quality Chinese open access journals in China and internationally.

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

Nigel Farage’s partner, a former waitress not known to have any private money, bought a £1 million house for cash shortly after he secretly received £5 million from a Thailand-based cryptocurrency billionaire - the same house that he claimed, months previously, that he was about to pay for himself.

If anyone in government has a few minutes to run the country in between plotting leadership challenges, could they please cast their eye over the devastation of Higher Education in the UK. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Greycation: when you have time off, stay at home for a week and it pisses with rain throughout.

😊 Great. This is fun. Hearfelt reply from someone without institutional access... A journal once had a paywall I was stuffed – could read nothing at all But papers are seen Open access via green Yay! For authors that were on the ball

Putting work into the public domain early is not necessarily an easy process but can be done, possibly most easily/robustly by creating a Creative Commons License for that purpose. There is a specific CC license for this ("CC0"): creativecommons.org/public-domain/

Last week on Wonkhe: Researchers studying trauma often carry emotional costs that universities rarely acknowledge. Robert Allen argues that it’s time for research ethics to recognise researcher wellbeing as well as participant protection

A short thread introducing people to some single moths I've found in my area, looking for fun. 1. Here, for starters, is a Canary-Shouldered Thorn Moth (I didn't make this up).

Up to 80 % of public street space in cities is taken up by moving and parked cars. In Berlin, private vehicles take up an impressive 17 square kilometres. Playgrounds get 3.3. This isn’t a law of nature. It’s a choice we make every day, and one we can stop making. medium.com/@Katja_Diehl...

PERFECT STORM: www.forbes.com/sites/johndr... Submissions are up, mostly written by AI. The peer reviews are also written by AI. This is clearly demonstrated in universities involved in a particular ranking. So here we go again. Thanks university rankings - remind us again what they are good for?

JOHN FOGERTY: I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain JAMES TAYLOR: okay, you’re not gonna fucking believe this

Update on DOGE: A federal judge just delivered a devastating ruling against DOGE, finding that Elon Musk’s operation “blatantly used” race, gender, and other protected characteristics to carry out the largest mass termination

Photo by @nicolehester.bsky.social for The Tennesseean www.tennessean.com/picture-gall...

Accountability, research, and understanding are dependent on information, which must be preserved before it disappears. #VanishingCulture #DigitalMemory #OpenAccess #Preservation @pbump.com @archive.org #OpenAccess #Preservation #MTVNews

🧵 "The internet isn’t just an endless archive anymore." 🌐 Journalist Philip Bump argues that preserving journalism & digital history is essential for understanding what happened online. 📚 Read the Q&A with Bump & more in VANISHING CULTURE, free or purchase in print: archive.org/details/vani...

The cat carrier of doom gave me this face this morning. I should have heeded its warning

Pierre Bourdieu once argued that the question of whether something is art isn't answered by the artist's intention or even the object itself. Instead, the quality of being "art" is conferred by a community — curators, dealers, auction houses, audiences, etc. 🧵

The normative fraud that Errington describes is something I've seen my whole career. A biologist once told me, if p is very small, it can't be a false positive. Teams condition on null being false, see anything that makes p small as truth-seeking. These traditions spread bc they get you published.

Here we go again. Every so often tech makes an incursion into history, completely ignores that history is a rigorous discipline with a methodology, and then claims that a mystery or issue that historians have grappled with can be solved with an algorithm. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

That's the west coast mainline for you

In 1998, a court decided that a woman's denim jeans meant she must have consented to being raped. This horrifying ruling inspired Denim Day, a day for sexual violence awareness and solidarity with survivors.

Perfect blossom on display in Aberdeen today ☀️

A wholesome story for nerds: On Saturday, I was signing books at a local bookstore for Independent Bookstore Day. The store had a signing-palooza with new authors every hour; toward the end of my hour, a woman came up and asked what my book was about. "Dictionaries," I said, and she lit up. 1/n

Minot Public Library director comes out swinging on library ebook costs with the best metaphor we've seen yet. www.minotdailynews.com/opinion/loca...

40 years ago they would've been getting ready to do that safety test on reactor number 4 at Chernobyl later in the night 😬

They could have just got regular-sized cinema bosses and given them a ladder.

I love the Nuart festival (on now). Even better, I was able to see my first new artwork for 2026 a couple of minutes walk from my office! If you are ever in Aberdeen then visit them. Free art, available to all. 2026.nuartaberdeen.co.uk

"A thousand dead humanitarians in three years - when did that become normal?" United Nations Under-Secretary-General Tom Fletcher on the violence facing humanitarian workers in conflict zones. Watch the event➡️ bit.ly/4cDWXbb

My favorite art history genre is "Judith beheading Holofernes"

Yes, but WHAT WAS THE NAME OF THE BOOK?!?!

Appalling (not surprising) to see RFK double down on his percentage calculation claims today and get the maths wrong again, but in a different way. Trump also nodding along in agreement with him. open.substack.com/pub/kityates...

The White House is completely silent as BBC confirms a consistent pattern of massive financial spikes occurring just minutes before Donald Trump makes market moving announcements. The administration is facing severe allegations of illegally profiteering off inside knowledge.

When I say I want a home library, I mean I want thousands of books in my house and also everyone shutup. To be clear.

I'm not joking when I say mRNA technology is more important than "AI" and it's a tragedy we're throwing billions into one while our government is aggressively defunding the other.

BAFTA pulling a trailer for an autobiographical game about surviving sexual assault only hours before it was said to be a part of a showcase is an exceptionally bad look.

"It's important to be willing to look at things that make you feel uncomfortable. To look very hard—instead of looking away—at histories that are conflictual and brutal. We should understand that, and rather than being afraid to look at these histories, we should reckon with their complexity."

More than *70* orgs are warning Meta that integrating facial recognition into smart glasses is a terrible, dangerous idea. Five years from now, when the consequences are abundantly clear and prevalent, people will point at this warning (as has happened with Meta and Big Tech, time and time again):

Genuinely depressing to me that your partner has to Doordash to raise money for your cancer treatment when you get old. What happens if you don't have a partner? Are we just working to pay a landlord and save up for a medical emergency when we're elderly?

Everyone from the Global South moving to the Global North for a postdoc should hear this advice:

Social media apps as Lord of the Rings characters, a thread: Twitter: Twitter is Gollum. Began as a normal halfling. Overexposure to evil left it thin and stretched and bitter.