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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 :)

37 Posts169 Follower161 Folgt
Juan Pablo Alperin@juancommander.scholcommlab.ca · 2mo ago

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:

Aaron Tay@aarontay.bsky.social · 2mo ago

[Blogged] AI Search Is Rebundling Everything Libraries Know About Discovery aarontay.substack.com/p/eleven-way...

AI Search Is Rebundling Everything Libraries Know About Discovery

Ten established traditions, an emerging eleventh, and why libraries need to have a more holistic view of discovery

aarontay.substack.com

Aaron Tay@aarontay.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Fun project, writing a "textbook" of sorts to explain to librarians what I feel is needed to understand Information retrieval.. Starts from boolean, explains lexical is not just boolean, covers ranked lexical retrival - bm25/tf-idf, moves on to simple dense embedding, how it typically trained etc

Alice Bennett@aliceponderland.bsky.social · 5mo ago

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.

Simon Kuestenmacher@simongerman600.bsky.social · 5mo ago

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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@ubuit.bsky.social · 5mo ago

📚🌍 World Book & Copyright Day by UNESCO inspires us to look ahead. Join our Open Science Lunch (Apr 30, 12:00): Is Diamond OA the future of publishing? 💡 Open to all! 🎓 uit.no/tavla/artikk... #OpenScience #OpenAccess

Open Science Lunch – For researchers, by researchers: Is Diamond Open Access the future of academic publishing? | UiT

In this Open Science Lunch, we look into Diamond Open Access publishing – publishing with neither author nor reader payment – and the movement of journals «flipping» from Toll Access or Gold OA to Dia...

uit.no

George Monbiot@georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 5mo ago

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.

Johan Sæbø@jsaebo.eurosky.social · 6mo ago

"I must study politics and the impact of AI, so that our children and grandchildren can study whatever they want without being ripped off by these idiots" - John Adams, more or less www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Platform capture of scientific knowledge production: publishers’ dominance, generative AI and Subsumption of academic labor

Academic publishing is dominated by a small group of publishers whose platformization practices are threatening academic institutions and their values. These publishers deploy digital research and ...

tandfonline.com

Bilbo Yaga@bilboyaga.bsky.social · 9mo ago

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

Helen Czerski@helenczerski.bsky.social · 10mo ago

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"
Caroline Armitage@carolinearmitage.bsky.social · 11mo ago

A really great set of 3 papers for anyone wanting to get to grips with systemic issues in scientific publishing in a concise and data-supported way!

Mark A. Hanson@hansonmark.bsky.social · 11mo ago

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
Jed Brown@jedbrown.org · 11mo ago

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...

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ@olivia.science · last yr.

"We are told that AI is inevitable, that we must adapt or be left behind. But universities are not tech companies. Our role is to foster critical thinking, not to follow industry trends uncritically." www.ru.nl/en/research/...

‘Opposing the inevitability of AI at universities is possible and necessary’ | Radboud University

Since the widespread release of ChatGPT in December of 2022, AI has taken over much of the world by storm – including academia. Most of this happened with very little pushback, despite a myriad of iss...

ru.nl

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ@olivia.science · last yr.

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.
Caroline Armitage@carolinearmitage.bsky.social · last yr.

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...

Johan Sæbø@jsaebo.eurosky.social · last yr.

På torsdag er det gratis online seminar (Open Science Lunch) hvor jeg skal snakke om da tidskriftet "vårt" ble kapret og det ble produsert falske artikler i mitt navn. Kom og hør en ekte røverhistorie fra akademia! www.ub.uio.no/english/cour...

Journal hijacking – the story of the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems - University of Oslo Library

In early 2023, the editor of the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems (SJIS) became aware that a fake clone of the journal had started to operate, tricking authors into paying article processin...

ub.uio.no