#AcademicSky I think a lot about this. AI will perpetuate all kinds of biases already found in the literature. Not just racism & sexism, but Matthew Effect and others. It's a prediction machine, based on what's in the ether.

Good piece by Jefferson Pooley on how LLM-powered “research” tools like Google’s “Deep Research” and Elsevier’s “AI Discovery” likely strengthen the “Matthew effect”: highly-cited authors are amplified while undercited (often female) authors are increasingly ignored: blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

"If we hand off the work to computational probability and the profit motive, we may reproduce, or perhaps worsen, an academic “class structure” with all of its accumulated (and now hidden) injustices." Post from @jpooley.bsky.social on the "Matthew effect in AI summary"

💥New | The Matthew effect in AI summary ✍️ @jpooley.bsky.social #ScholComm #Libraries #AcademicSky

Information/media literacy has slid off a cliff and here they are sending an avalanche down on top of it.

“Every successful technology needs to find a problem that people are willing to pay money to solve. In the case of emotion AI, that problem appears largely, so far, to be worker performance and productivity, especially in customer service and blue-collar labor.”

After the mass resignation from Journal of Economic Surveys over bad publisher terms, I could not imagine in a couple of years we would have **Reviews of Economic Literature** Non-profit. True OA. With @stanfordpress.bsky.social; 2 articles already up this year rel.journals.sup.org/index.php/rel

The April History of Media Studies newsletter is out, with updates about the journal, new bibliography additions, and CFPs! buttondown.email/hms/archive/...

The richest man owns X. The second and fourth richest men control Google. The third richest man owns The Washington Post. The fifth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros. See the problem here?

"SLACs face so many challenges today that their precarious survival may be more surprising than their escalating demise.... And yet the shuttering of Hampshire... feels different, not so much another liberal arts domino falling as the symbolic end of a whole tradition of progressive education"

The Entire Archives of Radical Philosophy Go Online: Read Essays by Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler & More (1972–2022)

There’s Trump-style corruption, which is all bullshit, bluster, bags of cash, and him daring you to stop him. And then there’s corruption of the John Roberts kind. It’s just as deliberate and destructive, but quieter, more genteel, like a cancer that grows in your bones rather than on your face.

NEW PUBLICATION ALERT! Andrew, Marcel, & I introduce & draw some conclusions from a series of interviews w/ anthropologists experimenting w/ data sharing, process documentation, intermediate publishing models, & infrastructure building to enable new forms of collaborative knowledge making.

See the new issue of History of Social Science, just published! Half the articles are free, including @brad.bolman.com’s account of Bruno Latour’s blocked appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study and Chas Camic’s short bio of Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class muse.jhu.edu/issue/56614

In the early 1990s, Bruno Latour was not hired at the Institute for Advanced Study. I wrote an article about that decision and what it reveals about the science wars and the history of science studies, now live @histsocialscience.bsky.social muse.jhu.edu/article/985884

On Elsevier's LeapSpace summary-and-citation tool: the camel-cased vacuity of the product name is an index for the whole thing: extractive parasitism on the knowledge that human scholars craft www.jeffpooley.com/2026/04/jo...

An effective long term strategy for those who care about independent and credible news would be to fund nonprofits to enable nonpartisan journalism. We can see where CNN is going, we need more ProPublicias.

This is absolutely disgraceful and deeply perpetuates the divisions between research active and teaching and scholarship colleagues. HE teaching requires research skills and this division is as incoherent and unsound as it is immoral.

Without support and engagement from the broader communities of institutions (e.g. HEIs, libraries, etc.) venture capital is looking to sweep in and centralise control of all of it. Some of it purely commercial, some of it for the data (which are, of course, not unrelated.)

Now is really a crucial and also vital time for supporting open infrastructures. Many have been built in many contexts. I'm reflecting upon @rupertgatti.bsky.social's end notes to last week's @copim.bsky.social conference on the work undertaken there to infrastructure the OA books space.

So the fact that we bombed a girls elementary school, while likely using AI for targeting, is going to be a major headline story dominating American news coverage when exactly?

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” James Baldwin

Irony alert: Springer Nature's Journal of the Knowledge Economy retracts 113 (!) articles from a special issue, for "compromised editorial handling," etc. Underscores one truth: special issue grift helps drive the journal-knowledge economy link.springer.com/journal/131...

Cutting, lovely sentence-level writing in this Andrew O'Hagan essay on the Murdochs www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

Goldsmiths drops three out of five deals with big publishers. University cites “financial and values-based” reasons for not renewing with Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-o...

"Quick, let's screw everyone over while they're too busy getting screwed over to notice" is a hell of a business strategy

Had a great day in Paris at the École pratique des hautes études mapping out the future alignment between @ojcollective.bsky.social & @openbookcollective.bsky.social. Here’s me with @rupertgatti.bsky.social & @joedeville.bsky.social (Fernand Braudel looks on). #diamond #openaccess

Our first report is out! Read on to find out why open research practices in AHSS are diverse and extend beyond the suite of practices emphasised within dominant accounts of open science.

Sad news but honestly a good innings for an APC-free, community-led open access journal.

An interesting post from Jeff here: with my technical hat on, I've long said that collectivised systems infrastructure is the way to go for HEIs and other overstretched bodies involved in open publishing. We need to pool resources and work together rather than waste money on individualism.

Waiting for an open infrastructure collective @oatp.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy @investinopen.bsky.social www.jeffpooley.com/2026/01/wa...

Until Miller’s gone these are just gestural purges to sanitize and consolidate his reign of terror.

Really hard to look at this and all the other examples of bravery and kindness from ordinary people in this moment not think also of the tremendous cowardice exhibited over the past year by some of the richest, most well-protected people in business, media and politics

The fact that every right winger with influence screams "who is paying for all of this" tells you exactly how awash in cash they all are, and how much they rely on that to keep their movement afloat.

Trump administration: “Alex Pretti was a demotic terrorist who planned to massacre as many immigration officers as he could.” Alex Pretti’s last words: “Are you okay?”

Just staggered by the complete moral void of not even *pretending* to wait for more information before pivoting to “the opponent of the state deserved it.” It is so insanely depraved. Soulless.

In hindsight, given the fetish for prediction that quant social science has always had, this seems like where the turn to data was inevitably going to go: specious and dubious prediction to feed the content mill; diluted social science to anticipate the narrative flow

OUTCOME: This is where Read and Publish deals have landed us folks. www.oaspa.org/news/latest-...

I’ve finally been able to start reading @samuelmoore.org’s book, which is excellent. Living up to the promise of good humanistic analysis, it’s making sharp conceptual distinctions & providing me w/ better language to describe & understand what I observe in OA publishing. doi.org/10.3998/mpub...

Wiley, as ever, serving its most important stakeholders, the shareholders. I’m not implacably against these licenses, but in the current dispensation the scholarly communities that created, vetted, & curated the knowledge aren’t even at the table in these deals.

Of course the scammy and shameless for-profit higher ed industry is pivoting to AI www.jeffpooley.com/2026/01/sa...

Editor's picks from 2025: Emily Tucker argues that the AI regulation debate largely misses the point: the real threat to democracy is unchecked data extraction and accumulation that is fueling corporate power.

Stop using us Jews as an excuse for doing cruel/stupid/illegal shit challenge 2026

The December History of Media Studies newsletter is out, with updates about the journal, new bibliography additions, and CFPs! buttondown.email/hms/archive/...

"we need to conceive of these “publishing beyond the market” enterprises as immanent utopias, spaces that show possibility within a system that they cannot overthrow, but that they can nonetheless structure through critique" Further thoughts on @samuelmoore.org's book eve.gd/2025/12/28/p...

"According to the most recent edition of an annual Harris Poll, for the first time, a majority of Americans believe billionaires are a threat to democracy. A remarkable 71% believe there should be a wealth tax. A majority believe there should be a cap on how much wealth a person can accumulate."

Happy Hanukkah to our friends who celebrate. Rachel Posner, a rabbi’s wife in Kiel, Germany, took this photograph in 1931 -- a potent reminder that fascism must be fought in every generation, even if it's wrapped in an American flag and a red hat.

We library folk do a good job talking about all the free services we offer, but I don’t see many of us talking about how libraries are one or the only places where you can use services without being advertised to.