Kind of missing the point of an ORCID…

This is a national problem not just a single institution. But agreed.

Picture of a slide with a table with blue and white stripes

ALMOST ATAVISTIC: the trend in tables to use blue and white striping (example here of fictional uni presented at a Digital Science day). It reminds me of the computer paper with the holes down the sides my dad would bring home from CSIRO for my brother and I to draw on.

Yes but when you publish you usually would need to choose one of the multiple affiliations for that paper. I am not sure how to resolve this- an email for life would be best. Maybe one based on your ORCID could work…. Then it’s a back end thing that links to your current affiliation.

Yes I certainly have this issue having moved institutions a lot. But when I publish I use the email address of the institution I am publishing from. Not sure how to fix this.

CAUL Consortium has published 100K articles under R&P deals and in theory saved $500million

MILESTONE: 100K papers published under CAUL R&P deals. I disagree with the expression 'saved' about the funds. We know that if there had to be a payment the choice would be that many of those articles would not have been made OA. 'APC cost avoided' is more accurate. But still - a big achievement!

QUESTION: In Australia we are having trouble with our R&P deals because about 10% of authors don't use their institutional email address. It causes issues with verifying if a paper is eligible. Has anyone done any work on this issue - why do authors use personal emails when submitting papers?

Yes for this reason and also because you can then manipulate the document in all sorts of ways. Just use the tool (Word in this case) properly! I check formatting in documents & if it is clear the author has used workarounds instead of formatting - I am judging….

What is the time zone for this event Jeroen? Just noting that not including one is very presumptive.

Research integrity IS research security. Not a nice-to-have — it's foundational. My latest blog explores the cracks in science's ecosystem that go way deeper than #ResearchSecurity.

Massive budget cuts for US science proposed again by Trump administration The 2027 budget proposal would curb federal payments for scientific publishing and reduce funding for many US institutions.

MORE CUTS proposed in US: www.nature.com/articles/d41... prohibit the spending of “Federal funds for expensive subscriptions to academic journals and prohibitively high publishing costs unless required by Federal statute or approved in advance by a Federal agency”.

UNFIXABLE: Does the AI business model have a fatal flaw? www.reuters.com/technology/d... LLMs are inherently probabilistic, not deterministic. They try to guess the answer that sounds best not the objectively correct one
And that’s not a problem to be fixed. It’s fundamental to how these models work

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.”

THORNY: "we inhabit a continually shifting, lawless terrain, where ethics and integrity are at constant risk of being sacrificed for the benefit of productivity and commodity. The onus falls to us—the publisher—to put in place guidance on the acceptable and responsible use of generative AI"

University merger ‘on the cards’ in Western Australia Cost-benefit analysis ‘broadly supportive’ of amalgamation of up to three Perth universities

MERGER in Australia likely (again) www.timeshighereducation.com/news/univers... "The cost-benefit study ... was due with the government by the end of last year but reportedly delivered late. Neither it nor the 2023 review that preceded it ... has been released publicly."

IT'S FINE - nothing to see here.....

READ THIS ARTICLE!
"It’s almost as if the uncritical and naive adoption of AI has made us more credulous and sapped our critical thinking at the precise moment we should be on guard against its evolving harms."

"To put it another way: LLMs are structurally indifferent to truth.”

Community perspectives on open science and open infrastructure - Make Data Count DOI: 10.60804/MX4V-7K47

SUPPORT OPEN INFRASTRUCTURE: makedatacount.org/read-our-blo...
“openness is not only about access, but about long-term reliability, interoperability, trust, and sovereignty... continuity and control cannot be guaranteed without infrastructure that is governed with public interest as its core"

I read Puffin books as a child in Australia and honestly thought they were made up birds until on a holiday in Wales where I saw I could catch a ferry to an island and see some. It was life changing!

Yes

OA Forward logo: On white background, bold black text "OA FWD" stacked vertically, with overlapping orange and red triangular arrows positioned to the right of "OA", forming a "forward" button symbol.

We are now OA Forward! ⏩

OA2020 has evolved into OA Forward, uniting with ESAC under new international governance, to advance the next stage of open scholarly communication.

Read the full announcement: oa2020.org/2026/04/08/i...

#openaccess #scholcomm

My heart goes out to all of you- a horrible thing to happen with no intent but terrible result. I hope your wound heals well and the muzzle plan works.

ADVICE - noting a PhD is to develop independent scientific expertise: learning to think critically, analyze data, write clearly, and form your own judgment. When AI automates those cognitive tasks, trainees can produce polished outputs while bypassing the learning process those tasks provide.

The ABCs of Diamond OA The global diamond open access community gathered in Bengaluru for conversation over kaapi and chai. Malavika Legge reports.

GREAT SUMMARY: "The ABCs of Diamond OA" from Malavika Legge from @oaspa.bsky.social summarising the third global summit on Diamond OA held in February in Bengaluru katinamagazine.org/content/arti...

Wikipedia's AI agent row likely just the beginning of the bot-ocalypse An AI agent was banned from editing Wikipedia pages... and that's when things got weird, with the agent publishing its complaints publicly.

HERE WE GO - scary story about AI bots www.malwarebytes.com/blog/ai/2026...
"here’s the worry: what happens when AI agents decide to up the ante, becoming more aggressive with their attacks on people? Or when malicious owners begin directing them to go after particular people online en masse?"

GREAT NEWS - it is excellent to see our Aotearoa colleagues doing the lifting with open activities!

Plagiarised research passed automated tests, and I detected it – but only because it copied my work The safeguards in place to protect research integrity are not keeping pace with the tools that can be used to circumvent them.

BEYOND PLAGIARISM theconversation.com/plagiarised-...
iThenticate found 8% match from her paper, but the problem was much deeper

"when someone reproduces a reflexive memo and presents it as their own, that isn’t about claiming someone else’s ideas; they’re claiming someone else’s experiences."

VII. Summary of the Action Plan The legal pathway enabling deposits in public repositories begins before any publishing agreement is signed. Institutions should secure a prior written nonexclusive license from the author at the moment of employment, by incorporating the institution's copyright or public access policy directly into faculty employment contracts. This ensures that the necessary prior license travels with every manuscript an affiliated author produces, regardless of what publishing agreement the author later signs. Where such an employment agreement is not feasible or has not yet been implemented, authors need to grant a nonexclusive license directly to their institution or funding agency before submitting a manuscript for publication. Funding agencies should move toward requiring such pre-publication licenses as a condition of the grant rather than seeking a license only at the time of final deposit—a timing that renders the license legally ineffective against a prior copyright transfer to a publisher.

APPROACH This is from the US (so not necessarily relevant in other jurisdictions) but it is very interesting:

osf.io/preprints/so...

Addressing Legal Uncertainties in Article Versions and Institutional Copyright Policies to Support Immediate Public Access to Federal Grant-Funded Publications

SPECTACULAR - I don't think I could try and write this badly:

"Also, hot from electric and warm from move make more hot, so need in work like earth heat take, oil get, and hot change machine in hole thing."

Part of me loves this. The rest of me is terrified. How long do you think we have left?

Guest Post — Diamond Open Access: A Lifeline for the Monograph? - The Scholarly Kitchen Today's guest bloggers ask: Can Diamond OA serve as a genuine lifeline for the scholarly monograph?

UPHILL BATTLE for Diamond OA scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/04/02/g... "actual publishing choices continue to be shaped by career incentives, reputation, and visibility rather than a deliberate commitment to community-owned infrastructures or long-term sustainability."