Introducing Overton Engage’s NEW Opportunity Matcher… Automatically uncover policy engagement opportunities that are relevant to you. *this functionality is only available with a premium Engage subscription. If you’re already subscribed, it’s going live this week - so keep an eye out!

As a librarian, are you looking for more ways to support researchers, create impact and engage with policy? Well, we have some tips for you…

I don't get the "tech companies are pushing IDs as a route to total gov surveillance" thing. Surely the lesson of the past two decades is that tech *already* makes it easy to track who you are and what you're doing without your opt-in. Not carrying an ID card doesn't make you an untraceable ghost

It’s Global Goals Week! A week of action, awareness, and accountability for the Sustainable Development Goals. We’ll be sharing some discussions and insights around the SDGs, plus how our SDG classifier can help our users understand how their work has impacted policy around each specific goal.

If the UK wants to cement itself as a leader in AI for scientific discovery it should create a text & data mining copyright exception for scholarly abstracts. It's frankly depressing that abstracts aren't by default open and readily available in the first place, but publishers are now rolling back

What's the vibe like at the Royal Society Future of Scholarly Publishing conference you ask? We were told that after 16 years & $100M dollars with the ambition to 'revolutionize' science and win a Nobel prize ResearchGate... is pivoting to working with traditional publishers on journal homepages

When asked about controversial topics Grok 4 sometimes searches for what Elon Musk thinks as background info - not something explictly asked for or necessarily intended by its developers. Fascinating and slightly depressing in equal measure simonw.substack.com/p/grok-4-sea...

Counterpoint: new Public First research shows every UK resident working adult (on a full time equivalent basis) is £466 a year better off on average as a result of international students. So let’s just publicise that instead of levying them www.publicfirst.co.uk/calculating-...

I got hearing aids today - it turns out I’ve been moderately deaf since having chickenpox as a kid but our brains just compensate and get used to it. I feel a bit like those babies on Instagram who get their first pair of glasses and can suddenly see faces in focus. But with more farts and snorts

I was intrigued by this, but maybe predictably it looks a bit rubbish in practice (much more 2012 video game cut-scene than licensed deepfake) www.ubs.com/microsites/n... - getting strong Ananova vibes news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/enterta...

Incredibly valuable read in @issuesinst.bsky.social for scientists and academics looking to do more related to policy... 🧪sociology 📉demography policysky polisky 🛟medsky episky

If you're a schoarly publisher not making abstracts freely available then you're failing at your job. Full text - license it. Abstract - open it. It's a straightforward scholary record / infrastructure vs nickel and diming call

Two biggest dangers to scholarly web infrastructure: 1) AI bots 2) Impatient PhD students who've just learned to automate web scrapes True DGAF behaviour

Really incredible story unraveling in this thread, where Amazon and other sites have seemingly been able to sell an academic textbook that was withdrawn in 2021 and never actually printed or published, without the knowledge of the press, editors or contributors. Something has gone deeply wrong!

Interested to learn how AI is changing academic search? In this 1.5 hr. "master class", I will share what I have learnt studying this area for the last 3 years. Register at eventregistration.smu.edu.sg/event/AISear... . Please help share!

If you haven't been following the State of Indiana vs Indiana University face-off currently happening (some legislators really doesn't like the sexuality studying Kinsey Institute) - the latest development is mandating "productivity" checks on tenured profs (1/2) eu.indystar.com/story/news/p...

I'd be super grateful if you could share this vacancy, and tap people on the shoulder if you think they'd be a good fit (e.g. they understand data and REF) and encourage them to apply. www.bath.ac.uk/jobs/Vacancy...

OK folks - will you please help me spread this far and wide. A really exciting opportunity to be the new Director of Comms at @britishacademy.bsky.social - the national academy for humanities and social sciences. £100k. Lovely team. Reports directly to me micro.green-park.co.uk/thebritishac...

Austin

We're #hiring! Apply to become our Evidence and Impact Manager - you'll lead, shape and deliver AMRC’s work to collect and collate data and evidence to understand, report and showcase medical research charity funding. Find out more ⬇️ bit.ly/41DTN1C

Academia.edu has finally made it

Yay! You can now follow @coarassessment.bsky.social on Bluesky! 👇🏻

We sign our new partnership with @overton.io based in the UK, which has the largest database of policies and grey literature! Our shared purpose will be to produce a series of reports exploring the reach and influence of Brazilian science research on decision-making. Isn't that wonderful?

We’ll be in Austin at the ER&L conference in just a few days! Come on by our exhibit to meet @mrstew.bsky.social and find out how Overton can be a key e-resource for your library!

Thanks I hate it

I lovvvved Tharg's Future Shocks. Shamefully, aged 13 or so I handed in some English homework that was, er, "heavily inspired" by my favourite story about a temporal weather report. Things escalated uncomfortably when the impressed teacher suggested submitting it to a short story competition

I'm going to ER&L (libraries conference) in Austin this year and they have an amazing sounding gig planned where every band has at least one librarian in it. Why haven't we done this at STI before and are there any bibliometrician bands already

We started this project in Oct '22 - it proved ridiculously (though maybe predictably) difficult to build something that could be applied consistently across different countries and policy settings. Great work from @kat-hart.bsky.social !

re: PubMed being DOGE'd / censored - don't see any evidence of this. You can't compare e.g EuroPMC searches with PubMed ones directly (saw @franknorman.bsky.social point this out on LinkedIn). By default EuroPMC searches lots of indexes: if you specify PubMed the numbers are much closer

We're looking for a new Head of Policy & Public Affairs! It's a key strategic role leading our policy and advocacy activities, incl. For Thought, Future Forum, and our secretariat to the APPG for Diversity & Inclusion in STEM. Closes 20 March: www.britishscienceassociation.org/head-of-poli...

Sad (and a bit shocked) to hear about Jan Vandamme's passing - you ended every call with him with new ideas www.eurofound.europa.eu/en/news/2025...

People think the hardest part of a start-up is product or maybe people. It's not. It's registering as a new supplier on large org procurement portals

An excellent reply

M-A-W-S-O-N www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

I've been watching Prime Target. Why does it big up Baghdad so much?! Do the Iraqi tourist board have some dirt on the producers? Is it a paid promotion? www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

"We are destroying software" antirez.com/news/145 ... agree with lots of these but it becomes much more nuanced if you think about each one in terms of "what should you do instead and what are the trade-offs". Is ignoring a bad standard in favour of creating your own really a good choice? etc

I only watch films with Nicholas Hoult in them now. But skipping Garfield

Think Tank Called ‘The Himmler Institute’ Assures Nation This All Legal — theonion.com/think-tank-c...

I wonder if AI companies will start poisoning the CommonCrawl / web scrapes used for training - like how you used to get misguided SEO people put loads of keywords in white text on a white background on webpages, but instead it's the wrong answers to benchmarking questions

Is there any research quantifying the degree to which biomedical AI advances have relied on training data from PubMed Central, GenBank and other open (& specifically directly NIH/CDC/NSF supported) corpora? I assume it's high

Determinedly sliding into the new week with all the enthusiasm of this 18th-century sea-lion Hope it finds you similarly blessed

Today's first world problem: I bought a cream whipper without realizing that the gas for it is a controlled substance (commonslibrary.parliament.uk/nitrous-oxid...) that catering companies are not keen to sell to individuals. I just want to make a fancy mousse

I really thought this was going to be “they watch you play Factorio for six hours when you should be sleeping” and got excited

"How hard can it really be to build a better journal management system, everybody hates them" strikes again scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/01/29/m...

V pleased to be joining the OpenAlex advisory board - thank you for voting (for me or anybody else)! It's a critical bit of infrastructure run by v smart people - the next couple of years will hopefully cement it further into the scholarly landscape. Looking forward to helping out wherever useful

I say this as somebody running a start-up. When entrepreneurs suggest that a sector (perhaps correctly) needs more money and more appetite for risk it’s hard for it not to sound like we’re saying please give us more cash and stop asking so many questions. Am not sure what the best framing is

I’m at the British Science Association #forthought event. Coffee done, the madelines are nice. Can I live-skeet? Probably not as I can’t thumb type fast enough

Date for the diary - I'm planning a new meetup in Central London on 11 Feb about #AI, #Publishing & #EdTech Meetup to explore the latest trends and innovations. If you would like to come along please register at: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ai-publish... Speakers and location coming soon!

Just reading that "40% of postdocs leave academia!" paper and I love the ideas & scope of the analysis but am skeptical of the datasets it's based on, specifically Microsoft Academic Graph, MAG's author disambiguation, and scraped LinkedIn (?) pages from a broker. Lots of issues esp with last one

Searched Overton for "AI to fix potholes" and discovered that Japan is testing technology from the appropriately named fukudaroad.co.jp