Not a great morning as woke up to very disappointing news about a paper, that I'll now have to submit to another publisher. Considering a) the extra work involved and b) many publishers now give all their content to AI companies, this thought does not fill me with enthusiasm. Another nail in the coffin of my academic life I think.

"For scientists, imagining a world without arXiv is like the rest of us imagining one without public libraries or GPS. But a look at its inner workings reveals that it isn’t a frictionless utopia of open-access knowledge. Over the years, arXiv’s permanence has been threatened by everything from bureaucratic strife to outdated code to even, once, a spy scandal. In the words of Ginsparg, who usually redirects interview requests to an FAQ document—on arXiv, no less—and tried to talk me out of visiting him in person, arXiv is “a child I sent off to college but who keeps coming back to camp out in my living room, behaving badly.”

Ginsparg and I met over the course of several days last spring in Ithaca, New York, home of Cornell University. I’ll admit, I was apprehensive ahead of our time together. Geoffrey West, a former supervisor of Ginsparg’s at Los Alamos National Laboratory, once described him as “quite a character” who is “infamous in the community” for being “quite difficult.” He also said he was “extremely funny” and a “great guy.” In our early email exchanges, Ginsparg told me, upfront, that stories about arXiv never impress him: “So many articles, so few insights,” he wrote."

https://www.wired.com/story/inside-arxiv-most-transformative-code-science/

Latest title in Open Humanities Press's MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series:

Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence by Gary Hall

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/

Open access
(= it can be downloaded for free)

If we want a socially and environmentally just future, do we need a radical new theory of change – or to radically change theory? It’s this question Gary Hall and his collaborators have been addressing for over 20 years with experimental projects such as OHP, Liquid and Living Books, and the Culture-Led Re-Commoning of Cities. Unsettling received ideas of the author and book, originality and copyright, real and artificial intelligence, these theorist-mediums test the ‘non-modernist-liberal’ modes of creating and sharing knowledge enabled by media technologies, from writing and print, through photography and video, to computers and GenAI.

Cadernos de Linguística is indexed by Redalyc a network that promotes science as a common good and enhances the visibility of research from outside hegemonic centers. Toward a plural, sustainable, and socially engaged scholarly communication.
#Redalyc #OpenScience #DiamondOA #AcademicPublishing

Our open review process ensures transparency in academic publishing. Sterre Leufkens (Utrecht University) highlights the impact of Tan Arda Gedik’s work, emphasizing the need for better metrics in language acquisition research. Her assessment is publicly available, reinforcing the value of open and rigorous evaluation.

Read the article: https://doi.org/10.25189/2675-4916.2025.V6.N2.ID785

New article published! “From Quarantine to Deglobalisation” by Tabea Scharrer, our RTG member Chinwe Beneditte Ogbonna, and Gerhild Perl is out in “Routed: Migration & (Im)mobility Magazine” (Issue 26). It explores shifting mobility under pandemic constraints. Read it here: https://t1p.de/co-article01

@unifreiburg @dfg_public @politicalscience @sociology @mehlera @histodons #migration #globalstudies #academicpublishing #histodons #sociology #politicalscience

Our #APC analysis preprint was cited in a Wall Street Journal story today, along with Elsevier's response.

https://www.wsj.com/business/media/scientific-journals-quality-publishers-6399fc95?st=NQ8a7Z

Last year, we found that @OpenAlex was mistakenly marking some papers as retracted—misleading researchers. We @hauschke reported the issue, posted a preprint in March 2024, and… #OpenAlex fixed it almost instantly!

https://doi.org/10.1177/01655515251322478

Meanwhile, our peer-reviewed paper on this? Published today - over a year later. See the difference? Preprints matter. Open science works.

Announcing the latest title in Open Humanities Press's MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series:

Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence by Gary Hall.

Available open access - to be downloaded for free:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/

If we want a socially and environmentally just future, do we need a radical new theory of change – or to radically change theory? Unsettling received ideas of the author and the book, originality and copyright, real and artificial intelligence, Masked Media tests ‘non-modernist-liberal’ modes of creating and sharing knowledge enabled by media technologies, from writing through to GenAI. Thinking outside the black box that renders Euro-Western knowledge-making practices invisible – keeping the human ontologically separate from the nonhuman – it shows there’s no such thing as the human, the nonhuman already being in(the)human.

#newmedia #academicpublishing #experimentalwriting #humanities
#philosophy #ai #openai #genai

Our #OpenAccess #book fund is showing real results! One of our supported researchers, Stephan Schleim, shared that their book "#Brain Development and the #Law: #Neurolaw in Theory and Practice" has been downloaded over 4,000 times!

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-72362-9

Stephan's publication was part of the first funding cycle that contributed to the publication of 47 open access books.

https://www.rug.nl/library/open-access/funding-deals-and-discounts/oa-book-fund

The phrase was so strange it would have stood out even to a non-scientist. Yet “vegetative electron microscopy” had already made it past reviewers and editors at several journals when a Russian chemist and scientific sleuth noticed the odd wording in a now-retracted paper in Springer Nature’s Environmental Science and Pollution Research.

Today, a Google Scholar search turns up nearly two dozen articles that refer to “vegetative electron microscopy” or “vegetative electron microscope,” including a paper from 2024 whose senior author is an editor at Elsevier, Retraction Watch has learned. The publisher told us it was “content” with the wording.

It sucks that posting a paper on #SSRN (or probably any widely used #preprint platform) results in semi-regular spam emails from predatory publishers offering to publish it in their (often thematically inappropriate) predatory journals.

Of course, most people probably send them to spam, but I imagine they're using the scattershot technique where they just need to catch a few people unaware of their practices who desperately need publications.

Check out our new preprint:

"Hurdles to #OpenAccess publishing faced by authors: a scoping literature review from 2004 to 2023"

We explore two decades of research on the barriers authors encounter in #OpenAccess publishing. From APC costs to concern that #preprints lead to scooping—what’s stopping authors from going #OA?

Read it on OFSPreprints: https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/vzefj_v1

So much to be learned from The Big Lebowski. Nihlists ("we care about nothing") burn your car then ask you for money. Publishers burn down science then ask scientists for money. Makes perfect sense ("lets see do I have $6k in my wallet for gold standard open access ... hmmm")

@academicchatter #openscience #academicpublishing #science #publishing #corporate #profit #profiteering

Todays Reply to request to review for Nature:
Pass
Please be aware I will no longer review for Nature Portfolio Springer
Not getting on a high horse, but tryin' to save y'all some time.

Easy Peasy - dont like for profit academic publishers, dont play along.

@academicchatter #openscience #corporaterockstillsucks #scam #academicpublishing

Peer reviewing in the 21st century:

word count of my review: 3.3k
hours put into review: 30h

publishing cost for the authors: $2,134
what I received as compensation: a PDF certificate.

Wow.

#PeerReview #AcademicPublishing #ResearchPublishing #PhDlife

#Journals | #EPJ Applied Physics
#NewArticle

“Synthesis, characterization, and optical properties of NiCr2O4 and CoCr2O4 spinel nanostructures for photocatalytic applications ”

Khaled Mahi et al
#EPJscience
https://bit.ly/4jAp51p
#MaterialScience #Physics #AcademicPublishing #ScientificResearch #ScienceMastodon @ScienceScholar
@academia @phdlife @phdstudents
@academicsunite @academicchatter
@ScienceAdm

#Journals | #EPJ Applied Physics
#NewArticle #OpenAccess

“Falling magnetizable bead in a Newtonian fluid ”

Stéphane Dufour et al @cnrs
#EPJscience
https://bit.ly/4ayM4G2
#MaterialScience #Physics #AcademicPublishing #ScientificResearch #ScienceMastodon @ScienceScholar
@academia @phdlife @phdstudents
@academicsunite @academicchatter
@ScienceAdm

#Diamond #OpenAccess is a sustainable model for #scholar-led #publishing where research is freely accessible to all, with no author fees.

A comprehensive guide is now available for #journal #editors considering the transition from commercial publishers.

https://zenodo.org/records/14652446

Featuring:
funding options
transition steps
available routes (including subscribe-to-open models and university presses)

I’m pleased to say that as of Monday I'll be working part-time as Head of Editorial at @DOAJ, the open access journal indexer lead by Joanna Ball. After working at three OA publishers and specialising in publication ethics, this role neatly blends my professional interests.

I'll still be available for other freelance work, providing it doesn't conflict with this role.

https://doaj.org
#DirectoryOfOpenAccessJournals #OpenAccess #DOAJ #EditorialPolicy #AcademicJournals #AcademicPublishing