Caroline Armitage

@carolinearmitage.bsky.social

Research Librarian at the University of Bergen (https://www.uib.no/en/persons/Caroline.S.Armitage). Here to keep in the loop about bibliometrics, scientific publishing, open science, research assessment and libraries... plus plus :)

1/ In 2024, I filed a false claims act lawsuit against Elsevier, Springer, Wiley & Informa alleging they systematically overcharged US federal grants for article processing. The gov declined to intervene and now it's public. Some thoughts on what this is, and what it isn't:

It’s mental health awareness week and most politicians of the UK have come together to make everyone extremely aware of their mental health by creating the most anxiety-inducing, depressing mess they can of British politics.

When we jump from 100,000 new eBooks per month to 300,000, we know that about two out of every three new eBooks are AI slop. May I introduce a new literary category of “pre AI classics”? This includes every single book published before November 2022 when ChatGPT was released 😉📚

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Almost everything we argue about is a substitute for the thing we should be arguing about: the immense wealth & power of an oligarchic class, which captures governments, ruins lives and wrecks the living planet. This class redirects our rage at scapegoats. To resist its lies is to resist its power.

2025 was mostly garbage, but there were some good moments. One of my favorites was when a family of beavers built a dam in just a few days, saving the Czech Republic 30 million Czech koruna (US$1.2 million) for a wetland restoration project the government had been planning for 7 years. 🦫 🌿

These eager beavers saved the Czech government $1.2 million

After plans stalled for a new dam in the Czech Republic, eight beavers saved the day seemingly overnight. “At this point, nothing that beavers do surprises me.”

nationalgeographic.com

TIL about a memorial ceremony in Iceland in 2019 to mark the end of a glacier, changing the place name from Okjökull to Ok (jökull = glacier). Uncompromising wording on the bronze plaque: "This is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it".

Bronze plaque saying "A Letter to the Future. Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.  August 2019. 415ppm CO2"

You know what doesn't wear an "I read banned books" shirt to work? A censorious computer program labeled "librarian". And that denial of agency is why fascists are so eager to displace librarians with a machine that does not do the same job and thereby poses no threat to power.

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ@olivia.science · 11mo ago

"Fascism and AI, whether or not they have the same goals, they sure are working to accelerate one another." 🗣️📢 www.404media.co/ai-is-superc...

Interesting! "Closed commercial databases, such as Web of Science, are not in line with our desire to work with open research information as much as possible. The UU signed the Barcelona Declaration in 2024 to this effect."

Jeroen Sondervan@jeroenson.bsky.social · last yr.

What might seem like a small announcement—it’s just one institution—actually carries substantial weight and has a strong symbolic meaning. @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social, has taken another bold step: it won't renew its Web of Science license. www.uu.nl/en/news/acce...