Chris Leonard
@hoohar.bsky.social
Academic publishing, peer review, AI, and other niche interests (MFC). Subscribe to Scalene newsletter here: https://scalene-peer-review.beehiiv.com
Every now and then, when people say stupid things about socialism, I have to roll out these lines from Arthur Lewis, on what socialists want.
Jo Wolff@jowolff.bsky.social · last yr."A society in which every child shall grow up in pleasant homes and attractive surroundings and with good educational opportunities; in which every adult shall be provided for in sickness and adversity; and in which the pensioner can take untroubled ease." Development economist Arthur Lewis.
I and others have long argued for more support for scientists to establish data provenance or evidence chain of custody to combat fraud in our journals. Here it's invoked to combat AI slop in ArXiv pracheeac.substack.com/p/arxiv-is-k... "Provenance is the obvious place to start.
arXiv Is Killing Itself So AI Doesn't Have To
Disclosure: I ranted to Claude with a bunch of my grievances and ideas, and had it organize them into this blog post.
pracheeac.substack.com
Who at Radio 2, over many years, as decided that weather and traffic people deserve airtime alongside professional presenters. Cos you’re wrong and I hate it.
More than 50,000 submissions to @iclr-conf.bsky.social this year? That's more than all the previous iterations combined. This is after the limit they imposed of 20 max paper per author. With this rate, we will have more than 100k next year. Need better reforms urgently. #SciSci #Academia
'The strike action, planned for 22 September, marks the first time staff have organised to walk out in The Lancet’s 200-year history. The Lancet Group, now owned by the Elsevier publishing conglomerate, comprises 29 monthly specialty titles, in addition to the flagship weekly medical journal'.
Staff at prestigious medical journal set to strike over pay
For the first time in The Lancet’s 200-year history, union members plan to strike over “unacceptable” pay offer
timeshighereducation.com
Nihar Shah did a heroic experiment for TMLR: he spent 20-25 hours over two weeks interviewing authors of seemingly low-quality submissions about their own papers. He confirmed what we all suspected: people submitting these papers have *no idea* what is going on in them.
Transactions on Machine Learning Research@tmlrorg.bsky.social · last mo.TMLR has faced a deluge of submissions, necessitating stricter desk rejection policies due to limited reviewer capacity Co-EiC Nihar Shah reached out to authors of 10 papers slated for desk reject. Could they answer questions about their *own* submission? medium.com/@TmlrOrg/ask...
In the movie version of this, after Piddington runs out of food water and money as a result of leaving the UK, the residents apply for asylum and end up housed in a military base, with HILARIOUS consequences. www.bbc.com/news/article...
Piddington in Oxfordshire votes to leave UK over asylum plans
Piddington residents voted over proposals to house up to 1,256 male asylum seekers nearby
bbc.com
This is both an interesting experiment and a sign of a tsunami coming for academia. AIs retroactively reading the research and finding both opportunities and issues with published papers, then sharing those judgements publicly. d3jhl7jsny6f2h.cloudfront.net
One for the money Two for the show Three to get ready Four for any other problem Nine to hear these options again
I'll be speaking on this panel about the impact of AI on open access (and indeed, traditional subscription titles) and asking if OA is still the imperative it once seemed.
OASPA - The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association@oaspa.bsky.social · 2mo agoLearn about two more panels at #OASPA2026 𝗗𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗺𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝗮 𝗚𝗲𝗻 𝗔𝗜 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱? Moderator: Sara Rouhi @rouhiroo.bsky.social 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗹𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗳 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗴𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀: 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝗜𝗻𝗳𝗿𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗘𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝗼𝗻𝗲’𝘀 𝗕𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 Moderator: Matt Buys @mattbuys.bsky.social Info us8.admin.mailchimp.com/campaigns/sh...
Right now what researchers care about is publication; review is just an obstacle in the way. But actually human review is the scarce commodity. We need a world where ~anything can be published, but if it’s careful and potentially important, it gets expert human review and a second draft.
Eugene Vinitsky 🍒@eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 2mo agoLets assume a year or two from now arxiv / conferences have 10x the paper submissions they currently have. This isn't implausible; it is now trivial to generate true but trivial things. What's the appropriate solution?
A study of private grant proposal submissions and publicly released awards from NSF and NIH finds a sharp rise in LLM use since 2023. At NIH—but not at NSF—proposals created with LLMs are more likely to be funded and to yield more publications. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/5zHM50ZBWoP
New blogpost deevybee.blogspot.com/2026/08/acce... inspired by recent depressing experience as a peer reviewer. AI-generated #fraud is getting very hard to detect. #peerreview
Acceleration of the arms race between fraudsters and honest researchers
I was recently asked to review a paper that piqued my curiosity. From the abstract it sounded as if it was a secondary analysis of a datas...
deevybee.blogspot.com
I feel like the debate over AI in academic journals is way too focused on where the capabilities of AI are today (or even where they were a couple years ago) and not nearly focused on where they will almost certainly be in the coming years… … and publication & research takes many years.
Is science beginning to feed on its own AI-generated output? “Epistemic autophagy” describes a self-reinforcing loop in which generative AI helps produce scientific manuscripts and citations. Future researchers and AI systems then treat them as part of the knowledge base.
“The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate” https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-massive-climate-lie-that-will-destroy-human-civilization > This massive lie can best be summed up as “when it comes to climate change... we have more time.”
The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate
Thinking we have time left to address climate change, or that “Net Zero by 2050” will save us, is driving us toward full social collapse in ways that become more obvious with every new broken temperat...
currentaffairs.org
As thousands of research academics are made redundant the whole system of free/cheap peer review will collapse.
The most important book of the year -- get out the pitchforks. LIMITARIANISM: THE CASE AGAINST EXTREME WEALTH by INGRID ROBEYNS
I’ve just woken up, but it took me a while not to see Andy Burnham’s robot arm tickling this woman’s breast.
Sunder Katwala (sundersays)@sundersays.bsky.social · 3mo agoExempting care workers from new ILR rules would make a big difference. Most told 15 years would lose their legal status long before that. This deal with three-quarters of that. But 250k people still could lose status if chefs, lab technicians not exempt too. www.thetimes.com/uk/healthcar...
When the story of why humanity didn't stop climate change is written, it will feature front pages like this. Even as the skies blacken with climate change-induced wildfires, right wing media continue their relentless crusade against measures to tackle it.
Very worried about this sort of thing hitting more broadly:
Looking up the lyrics to Being Boiled, and Google's AI summary helps me yet again.
Commentator on the England game the other night said Jude Bellingham was "worth his weight in gold". Assuming he is around 75kg, that's around £10m. Not really close to his value. He should have said "worth his weight in crystalline osmium" - £200m.
FIFA presidents are like UK Prime Ministers - somehow each one is worse than the previous one. Imagine yearning for the days of Sepp Blatter and Gordon Brown as some kind of halcyon days. Looking forward to Voldemort and F**age next.
As in 1066 England will prevail against the Norwegians before tragically losing to the French a couple of weeks later.
"I know it's not the sort of thing you usually do Mr Havelange but speaking as a nuclear power we'd appreciate Gascoigne's yellow being overturned and the match result annulled"
It was inevitable, wasn't it🙄 Of course the Telegraph would run with something like this👇 So let's remove some of the rose-tinted spectacles and also look at some of that data comparing 1976 with modern heat waves Because the 1976 nostalgia porn is wearing a bit thin at this stage 🧵1/23
