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.

Yet more evidence that the answer to this question is “No.”

I'm sharing this brief essay—on modes and mediums in scholarly publishing—just published in @jepub.bsky.social 30th anniversary issue. It's a worlds-colliding piece for me, media studies meets academic publishing journals.publishing.umich.edu...

Discriminatory pricing should be illegal. Discriminatory pricing driven by black box algorithms with observable biases should be criminal.

We are excited to announce the publication of our JEP 30th Anniversary Special Issue, comprising reflections from our editorial board and edited by Alyssa Arbuckle @alyssaarbuckle.bsky.social and Janneke Adema! journals.publishing.umich.edu/jep/issue/43... [1/5]

Great @archive.org talk btw @samuelmoore.org + @hjoseph.bsky.social abt reimagining open-access through small, sustainable, scholar-led publishing (Heather reminds us that the commercial academic journal publishing market is an $11B industry, w/ 20-40% profit margins "because of the free labor")

A thoughtful proposal, published in Nature earlier this year, for a G+ index (with G for generosity, giving and other 'good things' in university life)—set in explicit contrast to h index–style metricized academy www.jeffpooley.com/?p=2863&pr...

Out in spring from @bentarnoff.com & I www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews...

When we talk about how changes in the U.S. federal funding landscape will affect the future of scholarship, this has just become my Exhibit A.

👀ICYMI: "if the drain has a particular history and geography, it means that it is not inevitable. It can be resisted." #AcademicSky #HigherEd #ScholComm

It’s really hard to defend industry academic collaborations with meta as earnest, if they’re internally burying evidence of harm. www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

💥New: Money, Time, Trust, Control – How commercial publishers drain science ✍️ @danbrockington.bsky.social @aileenfyfe.bsky.social @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca #AcademicSky #ScholComm #AcademicPublishing

"academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it... The dominant four collectively generated... $12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024."

A robust ecosystem of many ways of having all the money stolen from my wallet will likely prove to be the most stable and productive ecosystem of ways to have all the money stolen from my wallet, rather than "one size fits all" solutions like "not being robbed"

Evidence from 14 research funding programmes confirms that early winners tend to keep winning (Matthew effect). But the idea that an early setback makes you stronger later doesn’t replicate widely. buff.ly/UEtcRd4

Sharing this short piece, "The Matthew Effect in AI Summary," about dynamics of cumulative advantage (and patterned reputation-laundering) in AI summary-and-citation tools from both the giant AI co's & the big scholarly publishers www.jeffpooley.com/2025/11/th...

It's called the Technological Imperative. It's the atmospheric feeling that a technology compels its employment, but it's actually fostered by hucksters + corporations. They're using it to make you feel AI is inevitable. I explain in The Lint Trap linttrapofhistory.substack.com/p/some-thoug...

Sharing this short piece, "The Matthew Effect in AI Summary," about dynamics of cumulative advantage (and patterned reputation-laundering) in AI summary-and-citation tools from both the giant AI co's & the big scholarly publishers www.jeffpooley.com/2025/11/th...