I agree wholeheartedly with Sam. "if your problem with open access is that commercial publishers are hoovering up all the money, design open access interventions that specifically prevent commercial publishers from receiving your money"
The CRUK approach will badly harm their patient advocates.
Good piece. “If your problem with open access is that commercial publishers are hoovering up all the money, design open access interventions that specifically prevent commercial publishers from receiving your money.”
Thanks for trying to recreate the twitter glory days. Means a lot.
New from me: Why funders shouldn’t withdraw money from open access publishing
www.samuelmoore.org/2026/04/14/w...
"The right to say no — including the right to withdraw consent — is described as central to genuine Indigenous data sovereignty, even though this challenges conventional academic expectations of permanence and open access."
nit.com.au/14-04-2026/2...
Had to bite my tongue every time the tech guy automatically accepted cookies on all the different web pages he visited while fixing my laptop. Didn't want to be that guy.
"This paper explains how grant-receiving institutions and their affiliated authors can dispel legal uncertainties and comply with
the new public access policies"
New from @sparcopen.bsky.social
osf.io/preprints/so...
Viktor Orbán to join Harvard University’s Institute of Politics.
The thing about APC open access is there weren't actually that many advocates for it specifically, but plenty of people tolerated it because they wanted OA. I'm not sure even they could have predicted how the publishing industry would destroy publishing in the drive for APCs.
So the history of OA reinforces what we already know: that academic publishing simply does not make sense as a market-based activity. Many of the experiments in OA now point to models much less dominant by market incentives, which is a more interesting debate than who was right about APCs.
But even though the downsides of APCs were obvious (just ask us in the humanities), this doesn't absolve the fact that open access to the literature is a really good thing. Many of the people loudly claiming "I told you so" were doing so from a position that subscription publishing was working fine.
The thing about APC open access is there weren't actually that many advocates for it specifically, but plenty of people tolerated it because they wanted OA. I'm not sure even they could have predicted how the publishing industry would destroy publishing in the drive for APCs.
the Science Wars are dead, long live the Science Wars
I had the experience of being cited in a publication, and the paper credited to me was a hallucination. I told the author, they blamed their co-author and then ghosted me, and no response at all from the journal. Some people don't care as long as they get published...
Very much looking forward to speaking more about @morphss.bsky.social with @jenniad.bsky.social on 21st April 11-12 BST & sharing the session with a great talk by Stephen Gray at Uni of Bristol. See the link to the whole programme below, and for our session, register here: gw4.ac.uk/events/the-v...
Haha that's a deeply cynical take on fact checking, but I agree there isn't much chance of publishers doing it. I think it would be very good if done well though.
"Fact-checking is how journals could add real value at a time when the academic community — which is also carrying out peer review, usually as a labor of love — are questioning what publishers bring to the table apart from typesetting and copy-editing articles and making them look pretty."
"In the late 1950s, the library at CERN began soliciting preprints from physicists, asking them to send their papers to the library, instead of to their private mailing networks."
It is inevitable that a HEPI report would advocate for all sorts of regulatory and systemic reforms like student distribution and reducing market incentives *way* after probably irrevocable damage has been done to the whole UK HE sector. Look at their reports from 2018-2020.
It's Hotdog Man stuff.
This "big-N quant research in Nature/Science journals" pattern is a direct manifestation of The Matthew Effect in scientific publishing (beyond misinformation lit). Groups with massive resources dominate glamor pubs burying complexity and nuance under size and impact. Metascience is a great example.
"Hormuz has made the end of American hegemony imaginable. It has also shown that, perhaps for the first time, the Global South possesses the political will and ideas needed to build a new international order."
www.equator.org/articles/the...
I wouldn't expect much vision from this administration but it seems clear that funders will be increasingly pulling out of APC funding without any consideration for what happens next. You won't improve publishing through austerity.
But then commercial incentives also lead to a cheapening of publishing work through automation, offloading work to academics and increasing editorial staff workloads. So the question is about what kind of organisational setup is best for what kind of publishing, rather than how much it "costs".
I sympathise with the fact that publishing costs more than many researchers think, but I always find these articles unhelpful because they're trying to justify a specific kind of publishing that only makes sense in a commercial setting. Things are different if you recoup costs through other means.
I assume that fabricated citations are a pretty trivial fix for the current GenAI models people are using to write fraudulent science papers. I don't mean this in an optimistic sense.
This is to say that the AI-generated stuff being submitted now is less and less likely to have fabricated citations but will still be junk, only the junk will be harder to spot and will require proper review. The good thing about fabricated citations is that they are an easy way of rejecting a paper
I assume that fabricated citations are a pretty trivial fix for the current GenAI models people are using to write fraudulent science papers. I don't mean this in an optimistic sense.
How did the whole #preprint thing start? 🤔 In my #OA article, I look closely at how the #library at @cern.bsky.social formalized preprint #communication in #physics in the 1960s; while my Comment in @natrevphys.nature.com gives a general overview: doi.org/10.1038/s422...
doi.org/10.1007/s110...
