Octopus is designed to change the incentives in research to ensure that what is recognised, rewarded & encouraged is what will best drive best practices * Sharing Research * Addressing Biases * Research Quality * Research Culture * Fair credit * Finding relevant research www.octopus.ac/octopus-aims

The leaders of four major physics infrastructure projects due to receive over £280m from UKRI were told in December they have “not been prioritised” for funding The projects include an upgrade to the LHC at Cern and a new US particle accelerator ...

Guest post: Forget pickles and ice cream. I published a fake paper on pregnancy cravings for prime numbers retractionwatch.com/2026/01/30/g...

@eve.gd "Institutions shifting away from big tech", eve.gd, January 25, 2026, doi.org/10.59348/bs2...

The future of software engineering is SRE When code gets cheap operational excellence wins. Anyone can build a greenfield demo, but it takes engineering to run a service. swizec.com/blog/the-fut...

A Path Forward for PubPub by Knowledge Futures www.knowledgefutures.org/updates/2026...

The 5 stages of the ‘enshittification’ of academic publishing by Martina Linnenluecke & Carl Rhodes theconversation.com/the-5-stages...

From Retraction Watch: Dogged by retractions, Iraqi researcher and publisher uses a different name retractionwatch.com/2026/01/06/d...

Why self-improvement starts with maintenance by Tim Harford timharford.com/2026/01/why-...

A tale of three norths in three photos 1️⃣ The pier at Berwick-upon-Tweed, where the rare triple alignment of the Three Norths (True North, Grid North, Magnetic North) left England in December 2025, drifting out into the North Sea. 📸 Lewis Clarke (CC BY-SA 2.0)

you say "i asked chatgpt" i hear "i asked [an improv comedy group]" an improv group wrote this report instead of a therapist i use an improv comedy group

My 2025 end-of-year reading and writing roundup eve.gd/2025/12/16/m...

Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)? Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"

the brexit referendum remains one of the craziest fucking things a country has ever done

LOL. No.

The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI by Cory Doctorow pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/p...

Bag of words, have mercy on us OR: Claude will you go to prom with me? by Adam Mastroianni www.experimental-history.com/p/bag-of-wor...

The Evolving University Library: What’s gained, what’s lost. by Steven Mintz www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

Excellent news from Proton Introducing Proton Sheets: Protect the data that drives your business proton.me/blog/sheets-... #Spreadsheets #Privacy #AlternativesToGoogle

And the Oxford Word of the Year 2025 is… rage bait corp.oup.com/word-of-the-...

We’re offering 2 years of Proton Pass to cultural institutions worldwide proton.me/blog/free-pa... Please repost to spread the word #PasswordManager #EuroStack

What Happened to Piracy? Copyright Enforcement Fades as AI Giants Rise "Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught." - Balzac by Lee Fang www.leefang.com/p/what-happe...

A Gentle Crash Course to LLMs by Blaise Brignac specterops.io/blog/2025/10...

20 Ways “AI” Has Created More Work for Me by @hedgielib.bsky.social hedgehoglibrarian.com/2025/10/27/2...

Wellington weather update: our weather station blew away overnight

AWS outage takes down half the internet. Here’s how we fix it. by Elena Constantinescu proton.me/blog/aws-out...

Out today! One of the best things I have done this year is to edit, with @laurajwilkinson.bsky.social, a book-length festschrift for @gbilder.com. The book is available to buy at Blurb (www.blurb.co.uk/b/12575812) but also, of course, OA at zenodo.org/records/1737... Let me tell you about it...

Can you guess who… - can blow up a computer from the command line? - managed the tech for an archeological dig from a tomb - advocated for persistent IDs as infrastructure for scholars, not just about them - cares about provenance and history for schol comm infra as for cheese

Rights Reservation Guidance on practical tools and protocols to help publishers reserve rights and protect content from unauthorized AI training stm-assoc.org/ai-trusted-r...

Acoustic analysis of Taylor Swift's dialect changes across different eras of her career by Miski Mohamed & Matthew B. Winn J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 158, 2278–2289 (2025) doi.org/10.1121/10.0...

This is a must read to understand the context of Britain's universities and their finances.

"Every Noise at Once was a long-running attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space... in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier."

dang, i love the UI on this, too! Each stitch and its name on a little purple button. It's an excellent way to organize the information and make it easy to scroll through/find something specific.

The Royal School of Needlework (RSN)'s Stitch Bank aims to digitally conserve and showcase the wide variety of the world’s embroidery stitches and the ways in which they have been used in different cultures and times. rsnstitchbank.org/wall #Pattern #Handcrafts #Sewing

Dr. Carla Hayden continuing to advance public knowledge as new senior fellow at Mellon Foundation www.wypr.org/show/midday/...

[preprint] Comparing Five Generative AI Chatbots' Answers to LLM-Generated Clinical Questions with Medical Information Scientists' Evidence Summaries by Mallory N. Blasingame, Taneya Y. Koonce, Annette M. Williams et al. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Pace Layers: Six layers of robust and adaptable civilisations sketchplanations.com/pace-layers

There Isn't an AI Bubble - There Are Three slashdot.org/story/25/09/...

The dawn of the post-literate society And the end of civilisation by James Marriott jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-o...

Is It Enough to Say a Journal Is ‘Peer Reviewed’? The Case for Rating Journals Based on Peer Review Quality by Ashutosh Ghildiyal & Gareth Dyke scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/09/16/g...

What People Are Getting Wrong This Week (and Every Week): Correlation and Causation Sometimes you have to say, "we don't know." by Stephen Johnson au.lifehacker.com/entertainmen...

An Open-Source Maintainer's Guide to Saying No Stewardship in the age of cheap code www.jlowin.dev/blog/oss-mai...

Deprecating co-access: Crossref plans and timelines by Isaac Farley & Sara Bowman doi.org/10.64000/w6p...

AI Darwin Awards Honouring Those Who Asked "Can We?" Without Ever Asking "Should We?" aidarwinawards.org

Scholarly Publishing Won’t Be Saved by Incremental Change We’re stuck in a moribund scholarly publishing ecosystem. Acts of refusal by academic researchers and faculty may be our only way out. By Melissa H. Cantrell and Lauren Collister katinamagazine.org/content/arti...

the brompton-ness of it all process knowledge and such like by Dan Davies backofmind.substack.com/p/the-brompt...

"How an Academic Archive Became a Tech Juggernaut: Early donors built JSTOR into a giant with more than $160 million in net assets. Now comes the AI challenge" By George Anders www.philanthropy.com/article/how-...

Contrast Lumo: the least open 'open' model by Mark Dingemanse (European Open-Source AI Index) osai-index.eu/news/lumo-pr... with What is a large language model? by Ben Wolford (Proton) proton.me/blog/llm

Google suffers data breach, puts out Gmail warning proton.me/blog/google-...

Who Controls Knowledge in the Age of AI? Part 2, Recommendations for Stakeholders scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/08/13/g...