I've published a blog post covering the practitioner day at #LdnOpenFest26 this Spring blog.lboro.ac.uk/rdm/2026/08/.... We covered a range of activities enabling openness from research data to rights retention to funder policy. Cheers to @drbeth.bsky.social for suggesting I present on #PlanS!

Anyone want to hear me talk about books for fun rather than for work?

Mo 🌸📚@moplayspoke.bsky.social · 2d ago

1 like = 1 book question 📚💙

A morning of dealing with vendor licenses and publisher negotiations. Not my favourite part of my job...

We’re hiring! Come and work with us to make the open access book landscape successful, sustainable and scalable. The role is part-time and fully remote.

Open Position: Head of Operations

The Open Book Collective is seeking a highly organised, proactive Head of Operations to help lead the day-to-day running of our growing organisation.

obc.copim.pub

If we spend money supporting research, education and practice in areas we're actually good at, there might not be enough money to throw at the long shot of being 'world leaders" in AI.

Margot Finn@eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 6d ago

Creative & performing arts subjects received £16.8 million SPG 2024-25; £12.9 million in 2025-26; £ O million in 2026-27. The University of Creative Arts will thus lose half of its government funding this year; Art University Bournmouth 40.7%, Norwich U of Arts 40.4% and Leeds Arts U 30.3%. 1/2

Moving into Libraries from Biology, people tend to be much better at this. Although there's sometimes a bit of aggro between libraries & publishers and we could all stand to remember that we're just people. Feels much harsher as I move a bit more into metascience events...

Simon Kővesi@kovesi.bsky.social · 3d ago

Four baselines for academic conference attendance: 1) keep to your allocated speaking time. 2) everyone is clever; stand out by being warm & kind. 3) be interested in everyone equally - from postgrad to Prof to conference administrator to catering & hotel staff. 4) in Q&A, ask an actual question.

Publishers making their product measurably worse so that they can say they're using AI and charge everyone more money. It's not even niche behaviour these days.

Grumpy Philosopher@stevecooke.org · 3d ago

Sodding Wiley now float an offer of an 'AI companion' to give commentary over journal articles you're trying to read. In order to get rid of it, you have to click, maximising the fucking thing, & then dismiss it. They make their website & published research worse to push AI garbage, arghh.

Hearing even someone who likes summer saying they're tired of this heatwave makes me feel less like I'm a totally miserable person.

Marie Le Conte@youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · 6d ago

in this week's newsletter! quite an angry essay on this BLOODY weather, which I loved so much at first but just cannot stand anymore: youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/the-great-... [free to read!]

Saw Spiderman at the weekend. Lot's of posters everywhere asking for no spoilers 😍 So no spoilers here, other than to say I basically squealed in the cinema, and also may have had a slightly wet face. If you like Marvel things, go watch it.

Happy Augtober y'all. I fired up my annual new Stardew Valley farm yesterday (usually a Sept/Oct affair). I am all in on pretending it's not summer anymore! #Augtober #Gaymer #SummerSAD

Trying to write this morning (I'm so behind on the book), but it's boring and I'm very much at the stage where I wish I hadn't said I'd write it. Time for another coffee maybe.

Very cool. The Biodiversity Heritage Library gives free access to its digital archive of historic texts and illustrations of species living and lost, supplied by museums around the world. Check it out here: www.biodiversitylibrary.org

Doing my compulsory cybersecurity training, it's classic stuff. "Phishing is a play on the word fishing", really? I guess every day's a school day 😂

This week I am holding onto my Eisenhower matrix for dear life. I may have reached the part of the ADHD cycle where all the cool things I've said I'll get involved with actually need work putting into them!

Is this a good time to mention that in college my History of Translation lecturer (Michael Cronin) told us that one of the first vernacular translations of The Illiad was into Irish, and the translator had to give the main characters dogs because in Gaelic society a free man had a dog

Why can't we be a global leader in something actually interesting that's going to help the world, rather than mostly making it worse? I don't hate AI, but I really do hate the obsession with it. There is so much that the money could have gone to, where we have an actual shot at being world leaders.

Kirsty Grainger @kirstygrainger.bsky.social · last wk.

Earlier this year UKRI launched a funding call to invest £40M in ONE AI lab. www.ukri.org/opportunity/... For some unknown reason they decided to fund TWO AI labs at the cost of £60M. An extra £20M. Just found. That's the equivalent of 7 more years of Jodrell Bank. www.ukri.org/news/ukri-la...

RIP Bill Oddie. Legend.

oh man if only somebody had had something to say about this 2500 years ago.

Faine Greenwood@faineg.bsky.social · 2w ago

Fuck you, Ian Bremmer, you abject ghoul.

Starting to have meetings with publishers around subscriptions now that we're moving away from TAs. It is not my favourite activity. Always had a huge amount of respect for aquisitions librarians, but it's growing all the time!

As *tech*, AI isn't exceptional. It's not exceptionally wicked. It's not exceptionally good. Take away the accompanying, galactic-scale stock-swindle, and we'd call AI's apps "plug-ins" and we'd use them and abuse them in the same way that we've used every other technology: www.normaltech.ai 1/

Two printing blocks; almost 150 years apart! In 1827, this block was used to print a facsimile of a handwritten statement by Fr Thomas Maguire, authenticating the published report of his public debate with Rev. Richard Pope on the doctrines of the Catholic Church. 1/2

Fancy helping get my wife to Canada to compete in powerlifting for England? This has been the goal since she got serious about 2 years ago and she's worked so hard for it. I'm doing my best in shovelling money at the dream, but any help would be welcome!

Dr Beth@drbeth.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Amateur sport is incredibly expensive. @katemontaguehellen.bsky.social is a PhD student who has been called up to represent England powerlifting in Canada. But she needs to raise some money to actually be able to go. If you've got a fiver, she'd be incredibly grateful gofund.me/325c3c1d1

So I’ve started Pride and Prejudice, and already I feel bad for Mrs Bennet.

If you would like a deep cleanse from all things AI, there's an immense thread about Pride and Prejudice which is an absolute joy. (Quote thread is disabled, so I've just regularly reposted). It's years since I've read it and I'm very much thinking about going back to some Austen now...

The more I see of the CILIP website the more I think - Was this just a quickly done mock up to show someone the general idea and it accidentally got published? Trying to find some justification for the complete lack of oversight.

I like that Charlotte Brontë was basically telling a soapy saga about how the world is a hard and complicated place and sometimes Shit Happens, and Jane Austen is just like, “I’ve met the worst and simultaneously most boring people you can imagine. Hunker down, let me tell you all about them.”

Absolutely not. The ghost of Christmas past gives us everything we need. In general I find Dickens boring, but I adore A Christmas Carol. There's no way in hell you could drag me to this movie.

Bloody Disgusting@bloody-disgusting.com · 2w ago

OFFICIAL POSTER - Johnny Depp is Scrooge in director Ti West's A Christmas Carol movie EBENEZER, in theaters November 13, 2026 from Paramount. Andrea Riseborough, Ian McKellen, Sam Claflin, Rupert Grint, Daisy Ridley and Tramell Tillman also star.

After a bit of too-and-fro, here's the dirt. The only way we'll see real changes is clearly the "sunlight approach" so with that.... Read about the misguided policy at Marine Environmental Research - and how the editor doubled down. adriftlab.org/news/equalit...

Equality is not equity: why we have withdrawn our manuscript from Marine Environmental Research

We are withdrawing a manuscript from the journal Marine Environmental Research, and we want to explain why, publicly, because the issue is bigger than one paper.

adriftlab.org

Dr Alex Bond@thelabandfield.bsky.social · 2w ago

Journal gives us 3 weeks to revise a paper. We ask for a 1-month extension because a coauthor is away. They said no, the most they can give is 2 weeks. Otherwise it's considered withdrawn. What utter nonsense.

You can tell how keen CILIP is on AI by the corporate AI keynotes they've had in the last few confs. But as someone who has often defended CILIP (& regularly written in their publications), I'm highly disappointed in this. If you want to use AI slop, you've at least got to check for the errors!

AlanFricker@alanfricker.bsky.social · 2w ago

New CILIP website is a mess of AI slop images. Check out the images of senior professionals and try and imagine the prompt that generated them. All backed by walls of fake books that look like the ones sold by the yard to furnish pubs www.cilip.org.uk/learn-develo...