My Easter books cartoon for @theguardian.com

Discworld QOTD, from Going Postal

"... women experienced a significant drop in research output (mothers had 31% fewer publications than did fathers eight years after the birth of their first child)." How are the stats for mothers of 2-3-4 children? As an academic mom of 4, I am not surprised at all. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The Hidden REF Competition 2026 officially launches at the end of May! The last competition had 24 categories and we need your help to ensure these categories still reflect the full diversity of research outputs and roles. Find out more and share your category suggestions:

New OLH poster!🔥 OLH reimagines Robin Hood for scholarly publishing as a call to action: divest from commercial publishers & support diamond open access. Join the fight for free knowledge. Download the poster & learn more: www.openlibhums.org/news/932/ #UKSG2026 #diamondOA #AcademicPublishing

The BBC not bothering their arses to cover one of the UK's biggest anti-racism marches isn't surprising any more. That's pretty worrying.

100% accurate guide to the types of Open Access #academicsky 📚

Might be the greatest opening paragraph of anything ever.

So, about those Eid prayers in London... "What's the highest thing in Trafalgar Square?" "Nelson's column, innit?" "And the highest thing on the column?" "Nelson." "And on Nelson?" "His hat." "And the highest thing on his hat?" "That bit that sticks up." 1/8

I wanted to use this quote in an Open Research presentation recently. Commercial scholarly publishers still living that dream!

A friend said “My cat would be a better director general of the BBC than that guy” and now I really want that. Endless documentaries about small birds. Biased news about dogs being pricks.

Yes, you got that right.

Four doses of an experimental vaccine to protect against Lyme disease reduced the number of tick-borne infections by more than 70 percent, according to Pfizer and Valneva. If successful, it could become the only Lyme disease vaccine available for people.

I'm not a believer in the Great Man Theory of History, but there's a certain credibility to the Fucking Idiot Theory of History. And a Fucking Idiot may well just have got us all into World War Three. 6/6

So, um... this is bad. Really bad. I looked at the letters that were translated by the AI, and the very first one I found was almost entirely hallucination. Thread:

Enjoy some recent good news from around the world 🌱 (1/3)

Thompson's hematologist at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Robert A. Brodsky, published a study revealing that the research now has an overall 94% disease-free survival rate. "[A cure is now] available to the majority, almost the entirety, of sickle cell patients.” #GoodNews #BlackSky 🌱

Here are some nice mushrooms

Artist Maja Zećo leads a soundwalk at the Science Teaching Hub on 22 May, exploring sound above and below ground in response to Aberdeen's Geothermal Feasibility Pilot. A WayWORD and Peacock joint. Book now 👇🏼 www.ticketsource.co.uk/wayword-fest...

It is a recurring tragedy for women and girls on the left that many of us believe that the men in our movements include us in their visions of a more just, equal, and dignified world, and we have to learn the hard way that they don’t.

Soon after they built Aberdeen South Harbour a few years ago, it started to be used by Harbour Seals for hauling out. Some striking nominative determinism in action. This one today was a bit closer than they normally are. #UKWildlife #Seals

New from @rluk.ac.uk: "Shared Principles for the Evaluation and Acquisition of Open Access Monograph Models", with direct mention of @oapenbooks.bsky.social, @doabooks.bsky.social, @openbookcollective.bsky.social & Thoth as prime examples 🌞 www.rluk.ac.uk/shared-princ... #OAbooks #OpenInfras

Discworld QOTD, from Reaper Man

This is an important one. A unity march takes place in Aberdeen on 18 Apr, opposing racism, the far-right and Islamophobia as part of a Scotland-wide series ahead of the Holyrood election. Show up and stand up for the kind of Scotland we want to live in. More 👇🏼 postabdn.com/out-and-abou...

Natasha Weaving, 37, made the chilling discovery on Monday when she noticed colleague Eddie Albington, 38, using his laptop in meetings before fully saying the stupidest shit she had ever heard in her life.

For Mother's Day, we're thinking about how to enable mothers to thrive in research. Research by the NGO @mothersinsci.bsky.social found that a third of mothers leave science after having children, due to factors such as gender inequality in child-rearing and lack of accommodation by employers.

Happy Mothering Sunday!

"Faster than a speeding bullet." I love watching border collies work.

bear

Nature Publishing Group finding more dastardly ways to lock us in, well beyond what I complained about in my letter declining reviewing for them

Exactly- people with caring responsibilities living in Aberdeen obviously not going to be in any way disadvantaged compared with London based people without...🤬

I recently spoke with a researcher working in the Global South who said she always makes sure to have a man from a G.N. institution on her papers. She doubts they'd get a fair hearing otherwise.

NEW on the @rorinstitute.bsky.social Substack: Researcher Similo Ngwenya examines the power disparities in North-South collaborations and asks if equity in science is a beautiful lie. open.substack.com/pub/research...

There are other reasons for the UK government not to award or continue Palantir contracts but this statement of intent by its CEO must surely be decisive?

This is the company the UK government has embedded in the nation’s services. Seriously, fuck everyone who is excusing this.

Palantir currently runs the tech that links our health data across the NHS Palantir CEO: "This technology disrupts humanities-trained—largely Democratic—voters, and makes their economic power less." newrepublic.com/post/207693/...

I usually avoid posting things from the other place but I will make an exception because this is so damn cool. @yappelbaum.bsky.social

Working on something similar here in South Carolina! FYI @aupresses.bsky.social

NEW #OpenAccess Book Drop: DESIRE: Subject, Sexuation & Love, by Ana María Munar, uses the story of “The Little Mermaid,” as well as art & popular culture to explain the complex landscape of desire and its relation to love and sexuation. FREE to download: tinyurl.com/3ekk8xec #desire #sex #love

Keep calm and be transparent: advice from scientists who retracted their papers www.nature.com/articles/d41... @elisabethbik.bsky.social

good night, sewers. good night, streams. good night, operations and maintenance teams. good night, settling tanks. good night, stream banks. good night, engineers, scientists, crews, managers, inspectors, analysts too. a good night for us means serving with care. good night, sewers, everywhere.

Extraordinary new public humanities resource that curates in near real-time over 50,0000 items from sources/channels of humanities-related scholars who create pubic-facing essays, podcasts, videos, blogs, etc.: publicscholarship.org

Vaping was sold as the safe alternative to smoking. The evidence is now telling a more complicated – and more worrying – story.

NEWS: The Trump administration confirmed it bombed a girl’s school in Iran. It's one of the most devastating military errors in decades. Trump lied about it. Pete Hegseth gutted the office preventing civilian casualties. 175 are dead. Most were kids. Hegseth should be fired.

Plese repost & share! *THE OPEN ACCESS COMPANION TO THE CANTERBURY TALES*, a free, scholar-produced onlyne resource for teachinge and learninge *The Canterbury Tales* at the universitye level: opencanterburytales.lsusites.org

We're thrilled to announce the Ctrl-Z Award, a US$2,500 prize for researchers “who discover substantial errors in their published work and take meaningful steps to correct the scientific record." Covered by @nature.com today; read more here: centerforscientificintegrity.org/2026/03/10/a...

Yes, hello, is that God? Yeah, hi. I have a complaint. You gave me this brain that’s designed for finding berries and avoiding lions and now people are ‘just circling back’ to see if we can ‘move the needle’ on ‘key initiatives’? NONE of those things are berries.

It pays to get organized. 🗃️ cghlewis.com/talks/cos/