I wonder if the differing responses to AI are down to arXiv having a sustainability model that's more mature and dependent on institutional funding, while Openrxiv is newer and looking to more to commercial services and partnerships for sustainability.

RIP Paolo Virno

I wonder if the differing responses to AI are down to arXiv having a sustainability model that's more mature and dependent on institutional funding, while Openrxiv is newer and looking to more to commercial services and partnerships for sustainability.

"Until a year ago, only 2–3% of submissions were ultimately rejected by moderators, says Steinn Sigurðsson, an astrophysicist at Penn State University in University Park who is arXiv’s scientific director. But in the last year, that number has gone up to 10%."

Was stuck dealing with a chatbot and so I repeated the word COMPENSATION over and over again until they gave me a tenner. Love AI.

Quite a good illustration of why the problems of knowledge production are not about "misplaced incentives" but the degradation of the material conditions that allow us to do our work.

💯 and it's troubling so many people still think that reforming promotion and tenure policies is a magic solution

Solidarity with @pcsunion.bsky.social workers at the British Library. 300 workers on strike. Some of them having to take second jobs or taking out loans just to be able to survive. A Pay "award" below inflation is a pay cut. Unacceptable. Solidarity - and keep organising! ✊🏼

Quite a good illustration of why the problems of knowledge production are not about "misplaced incentives" but the degradation of the material conditions that allow us to do our work.

I'm really interested in preprint review, especially how we can orchestrate collective feedback on preprints. I know this is just one option of many, but a commercial AI tool for feedback feels to me like the wrong direction when what's needed is better ways of gathering human readers.

My prediction is that LLM peer review will slow down science. It will do this for precisely the same reasons that contemporary peer review does and some extra ones. Start by reading @hansonmark.bsky.social thread below, then read on. 🧵

Public Data Cultures is out today on @politybooks.bsky.social! 📗🎊 jonathangray.org/2025/10/23/p... It aims to nurture critical and creative engagements with public data as cultural material, medium of participation and as site of transnational politics. Happy to see it out in the world! 🦔🌌💜

It's funny that I just tried out qed and put out a mammoth thread on my experience: bsky.app/profile/hans...

I'm really interested in preprint review, especially how we can orchestrate collective feedback on preprints. I know this is just one option of many, but a commercial AI tool for feedback feels to me like the wrong direction when what's needed is better ways of gathering human readers.

The journal History of Humanities invites proposals for Special Issues aka Theme Issues. A Theme can comprise, for instance, 8-10 papers of 10,000 words each, by different authors on a coherent theme of current interest in history of the humanities. See: www.journals.uchicago.edu/journals/hoh...

Newly released Stockholm 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗱𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗲 Declaration recommends the following _alternative_ agenda: 1. The current situation is just fine, actually. 2. No changes necessary. 3. We like who's in control and the incentive structure. 4. Thanks for your concern though!

Newly released Stockholm Declaration recommends the following reforms to publishing: 1. Academia resumes control of publishing 2. Incentive systems to merit quality, not quantity 3. Independent fraud detection and prevention 4. Legislation and policies to protect science quality and integrity

Seems like a good day for big ideas.

Listen tomorrow at 11 a.m. CST to @21st.show from Illinois Public Media - I talk about my reporting on Baker & Taylor for @404media.co but it's really worth your time to get the POV from Sarah Stumpf, an adult collection management librarian w Rockford Public Library will.illinois.edu/am/willplayer

Newly released Stockholm Declaration recommends the following reforms to publishing: 1. Academia resumes control of publishing 2. Incentive systems to merit quality, not quantity 3. Independent fraud detection and prevention 4. Legislation and policies to protect science quality and integrity

I am SO happy to be able to share the wonderful cover for DISPATCHES FROM THE AVANT-GARAGE: THE ALTERNATIVE PRESS coming in March from Wayne State UP. The cover has it all—postcards, letterpress, a bison. Beautifully designed, as it happens, by Lindsey Cleworth, who grew up in my/our hometown.

"On one side are dishonest authors and institutions seeking to inflate their reputations. On the other are industrial-scale productions of fake science publications and publishers charging spiralling publication fees to maximise their profits."

I always find it strange watching people trying to dampen optimism after a political victory. Why not just let people feel a bit of hope?

[REFLECTIONS] Great write up by Jonathan Gray of the recent symposium on 'collective infrastructures for publishing' convened by our Experimental Publishing Group and ServPub Really looking forward to reading what follows from this gathering! 👉

Cannot be overstated that the liberal political and media establishment in the UK has spent the past ten users scorching the earth on the left while insisting that the very very best you'll ever get in elected politics is a Starmer/Cuomo type

Our new book, Notes Toward a Digital Workers’ Inquiry, is out today! Use the code DIGI-WORKERS-HOMIE on the @commonnotions.bsky.social site for a 25% discount

"The problem we face today is not one of openness per se, but rather one stemming from an absence of governance around openness." Nice piece by Stefaan G. Verhulst on the need for a "Reinvented Data Commons" sverhulst.medium.com/the-weaponis...

Three-fifths of the Gigascience editorial board resign after the publisher fired a bunch of editorial and software staff. Nice to see some solidarity with publishing colleagues. retractionwatch.com/2025/11/03/d...

"Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons" Open access, #OA, book - well worth taking a look at | @uofmpress.bsky.social | @samuelmoore.org | buff.ly/RJHftbS

How to conceptualise research environments for transdisciplinary work? How do researchers negotiate such spaces, and with which implications for knowledge produced? @rosetrappes.bsky.social and I answered by proposing the idea of "multiplex research environments"! See: rdcu.be/eN8ie #philsci

Three-fifths of the Gigascience editorial board resign after the publisher fired a bunch of editorial and software staff. Nice to see some solidarity with publishing colleagues. retractionwatch.com/2025/11/03/d...

Received a spam invitation to Wiley's 'researcher academy' which advertises itself as providing the training that researchers want but that libraries aren't currently offering. These companies hate libraries and want rid of them. wileyresearcheracademy.com

Kind of funny how people are identifying any place that publishes even the most inconsequential stuff and then flooding it with AI junk.

So much of the current discourse on scholarly communication can be explained but the fact that commercial publishers have given publishing such a bad name that people want to get rid of it all and just have preprints.

THIS. In all the discussions about Publish-Review-Curate, alt peer review models, etc., too often the other things (good) journals (should) do are often omitted. Information verification and many other checks are as, if not more important, journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

The Weekly Read is "Archival Irruptions" by @ktgerbs.bsky.social, which traces how British colonial authorities in mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica came to criminalize Obeah, a religious practice held by enslaved Africans. Read the entire book now, for free! buff.ly/rccy0qL

Want to be part of our brilliant MPhil and PhD in Digital Humanities cohorts next year? Come along to our mixed subject session online today at 5pm to find out more! Register: www.cdh.cam.ac.uk/events/40209/

“This is an extremely serious and troubling case that raises wider concerns about the academic freedom of staff and students at universities across the UK.” www.theguardian.com/education/20...

"It's hard not to think this outcome was predictable and also preventable. We know what happens when private equity gets involved with businesses not expected to generate high growth or returns, as well as what happens when there's too little market competition in any given sector."

I mean, sure, nice idea. A more interesting essay (from these authors in particular) would be: “Why Did We Ignore Voices That Continually Told Powerful People Like Us Not To Build AI Like We Have — And What Does This Teach Us About How Power & Money Work In U.S. Universities?” That’d be a banger.

My LA-based in-laws always buy me some merchandise celebrating whenever an LA sports team does well. I don't particularly care about baseball but it's always nice to have a new hat.

"The question is whether we will rebuild the institutions of open science that made AI possible in the first place — or instead allow them to be eroded by concentrated commercial power." hai.stanford.edu/news/univers...

A spooky listen, full of higher ed ghosts ‘n’ ghouls.. but also rich with fresh ideas & possibility for the humanities. Thanks to @mattseybold.bsky.social for having me on & @cnewf.bsky.social for his vision!

"The advent of large language models have made this type of content relatively easy to churn out on demand, and the majority of the review articles we receive are little more than annotated bibliographies, with no substantial discussion of open research issues."

"The framing of LLMs as preserving the lives of those we have lost distracts from the lost livelihoods, and worsened material conditions, of a generation of writers on whose work the technology of LLM feeds—and the loss of innumerable voices and the stories they won’t be able to tell." Great piece.

Cooking up some memes for a @reproducibilitea.org session on Open Research next week. This is gonna be fun!

"Beyond documenting Goffman’s intellectual network, Mapping Goffman’s Invisible College uses his connections as a case study to examine interdisciplinarity, invisible colleges, and disciplinary history."

A permanent post in my department. Closing date Dec 14th 2025, interviews in March. Please spread #histsci

Lol best of luck