Why free software is a must for open access tools: the case of B!SON

Anita Eppelin;  Marco Tullney ;  Elias Entrup: diesen Beitrag auf Deutsch lesenB!SON is a journal recommendation system developed at TIB that supports authors in their search for a suitable open access journal. B!SON is provided as free software, thereby enhancing transparency and sustainability. In this way, TIB underlines its commitment to openness and free software and supports an open ecosystem of open access tools.This support takes many forms: participation in development communities (e.g. for Open Journal Systems), funding (e.g. through the DSpace consortium Germany), translation of documentation (e.g. for the OJS documentation) or through participation in committees. Plus, TIB develops open source tools from scratch. One example of this is B!SON – a case that illustrates why we are convinced of the value of free software, particularly in the context of a fair and sustainable open-access transformation.How does B!SON help? Simple, transparent, data protection-compliant, and publisher-independentIn many disciplines, researchers have to take numerous factors into account when choosing a journal in which to publish their research findings. This is where B!SON offers support: authors enter information about their manuscript via a simple web interface (available in German and English). Based on this, B!SON generates recommendations for suitable open access journals. This is done in a data-protection-compliant and transparent manner using a machine-learning algorithm that analyses the manuscript for similarities to previously published articles. For further information on the procedures and technical implementation, please refer to this publication.The recommendations issued by B!SON are publisher-independent. In other words, journals are recommended purely on the basis of similarities found in title, abstract or references. It makes no difference whether they are published via an institutional publishing service or by a major publisher, thereby enhancing the visibility of newer and scholarly-led journals. This is what particularly sets B!SON apart from many commercial journal recommenders, which often only recommend journals from their own publisher’s portfolio. A comparison of various journal recommenders in this article shows that publisher-owned journal recommenders dominate the landscape and that open source is the exception. TIB takes responsibility for the long-term provision and maintenance of B!SON.B!SON is free software, provided by TIBTIB operates and maintains B!SON and makes the code available under an AGPL licence, along with an open API, for reuse, further development and integration.Interested organisations and individuals have a wide range of options available to them under the open licence.They can use the software independently without having to pay for it. They can analyse the software, understand how it works and look for errors. They may also adapt the software, for example to use other data sources, apply different weightings or implement their own design ideas. Finally, they may distribute the software themselves, either in its original or modified form, or build services on top of it.The free accessibility of the tool and its code significantly increases transparency, which is particularly important in the case of a recommendation system. Everyone can see for themselves that the software does what we claim it does. It also contributes to sustainability – the recommendation system can continue to be used in the future, free of charge and under the user’s own control. Any funding received has been put to the best possible use by resulting in a freely accessible outcome that is neither an opaque ‘black box’ nor exclusively available to a single organisation.B!SON integrates open data sourcesIn order to generate recommendations, B!SON requires comparative data – to identify relevant journals in which articles with similar research questions have been published in the past. We obtain this data from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and OpenCitations. Both are community-driven initiatives that make their datasets available under open licences (DOAJ article and journal metadata and OpenCitations Meta) and operate in accordance with the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructures (DOAJ 2025, OpenCitations 2026). We maintain close contact with the teams behind these data sources and, for example, notify them if we notice any discrepancies in the datasets whilst working with B!SON.Developed in collaboration with the library and open access communityB!SON emerged from an externally funded project, during which we asked representatives from academic institutions, particularly libraries, for feedback, which helped to improve the tool. A common piece of feedback was that institutions wished to adapt B!SON to their local circumstances, so that, for example, information on local funding opportunities would be displayed alongside recommended journals.This request led to the creation of the B!SON service, which enables institutions to use B!SON in a targeted manner, tailored to their specific circumstances, for publication advice. More than 20 institutions are already using the B!SON service.It may seem obvious: tools developed with the aim of strengthening Open Access should be free software. Just like B!SON. Access the tool here and the code here. Feedback is welcome: bison@tib.euDer Beitrag Why free software is a must for open access tools: the case of B!SON erschien zuerst auf TIB-Blog.

blog.tib.eu

Claudia Frick, Luisa Blumenthal, Henriette Dymke: Claudia Frick, Luisa Blumenthal and Henriette Dymke examine how queer people, topics and perspectives are incorporated into library and information science education in Germany. This area, including the need to develop queer competencies, remains underresearched. Their project investigates current teaching through surveys of students and educators, a practical workshop with library professionals, and an analysis of degree theses. Combining these approaches, the research explores existing educational practices and derives perspectives for more queer-inclusive teaching in the future. The study addresses both representation within academic programmes and the development of competencies relevant to queer inclusion in library and information science education.

doi.org

Klaus-Dieter Lehmann: Obituary: “Klaus G. Saur – Das Lebenswerk”. A tribute in German to publisher and bibliographer Klaus G. Saur, reflecting on his life’s work in scholarly communication and libraries.

doi.org

Lorenz Weinberg: Lorenz Weinberg’s article examines how diversity discourse in libraries can better address academic libraries while integrating class, educational equity, social justice and welcome cultures. Drawing on a master’s thesis and twelve guided interviews with first-generation students at Berlin universities, the study foregrounds students’ own experiences. It reveals a tension between feeling comfortable and feeling out of place, highlighting barriers ranging from unclear communication to classist structures. From these findings, Weinberg derives recommendations for more inclusive spatial design, more flexible access provisions and more empathetic communication, advocating a shift in diversity management toward social equality of opportunity.

doi.org

Elon Musk: Zerschlagt Elon Musks Imperium!

DIE ZEIT: Ausland - Mark Schieritz: Die Machtkonzentration der US-Großkonzerne ist eine Gefahr für Freiheit und Wohlstand. US-Präsident Donald Trump duldet das, denn er profitiert davon.

zeit.de

Vladimir Putin, the Humanitarian

Alexandra Petri: “You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian. You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that, I commend you, and I thank you again.”— Steve Witkoff, U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, addressing Russian President Vladimir PutinMark Wednesday, October 21, 2026, as “the day words lost all meaning.” My dictionary just ran outside and threw itself off a bridge. Noah Webster arose from his grave and lurched around, howling and tearing at his hair. Samuel Johnson is bellowing something awful; I can hear it across the Atlantic Ocean. George Orwell is sighing; he has been here before.I have to imagine that Putin is a little insulted at being so gravely misunderstood. With this single word, humanitarian, our envoy has revealed a stunning ignorance of the Russian president’s life’s work. This is like going to Picasso and praising him as a “representational painter,” or calling the Sahara “the wettest place in the world,” or describing Witkoff’s statement as “unembarrassing.”I see, perhaps, where the misunderstanding began. Putin referred to Trump as a “humanitarian,” and Witkoff thought to himself: Ah! This word clearly has a different meaning than I have been led to believe! I will have to reconstruct its definition from context clues. Maybe it’s someone with P in his name. Maybe it’s someone who doesn’t think that the United States should be in NATO. Maybe it’s someone who would look really good on horseback. Maybe no words mean anything! Maybe they are just phonemes to be thrown at a wall, at random, in the manner of that great representational painter Jackson Pollock.One of the conditions of freedom is that words have an understood meaning. If Putin is a humanitarian, then Dolly Parton was an axe murderer. Who else gets to be filed under humanitarian if Putin makes the cut? Stalin? The iceberg that sunk the Titanic? Calling Putin a humanitarian is like calling Hannibal Lecter a humanitarian, although there is more of a case to be made for Hannibal because he does, at least, subsist on people.Let me start over. It is nice and convenient, I think, when words have meaning. It makes it easier to order a sandwich. When words are more of a suggestion, reality evaporates at your touch, and none of your rights is secure. Good luck getting a sandwich then! Real is fake, fake is real, and all your society’s most precious values carry a disconcerting wink: freedom, free speech, meritocracy, equality. When you chant them, when you promise them to one another, you are not sure exactly what you are saying. Their meaning melts like hot wax, and homeland security becomes an unmarked car slamming into your neighbor.Authoritarians treat words as a game. (Putin, great humanitarian that he is, has some experience with this.) Perhaps war is peace (big news for the Nobel Committee, if true)!Perhaps the best humanitarian is whoever voids the world of the most people! Perhaps election integrity is the exact opposite of that!In the spirit of this new, callous disregard for words and their meaning, I say: Great job! Well done! What a magnificent time to be alive, when all of the best people are in charge.© Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Peter Kovalev  / Pool / AFP / Getty.

theatlantic.com

OpenAlex covers nearly every OJS journal

Casey M: We’re excited to announce that 95% of the 55,705 active Open Journal Systems (OJS) journals now have articles in OpenAlex, up from 80%. Over the past month we added 10,870 journals and now harvest 21,864 directly from their own feeds, up from 50.OJS is an open-source publishing platform from the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). Many of the journals that run on it are open access, regional or not in English, and they’re often missing from bibliographic databases. Until now, many were missing from ours.By the numbersBeforeNowOJS journals with articles in OpenAlex44,464 (80%)52,927 (95%)Articles from OJS journals in OpenAlex14.6 million18.8 millionArticles published in 20251.51 million2.10 millionOJS journals we harvest from their own feed5021,864Our journal list is PKP’s Beacon: the 55,705 OJS journals that are online, published in 2025 and have an ISSN. Article counts are OpenAlex’s own.What we changedUsing PKP’s public list of OJS journals, we stopped waiting for OJS articles to reach us through Crossref and aggregators, and went to the journals directly.A source for every journal. We created 10,141 new journal sources from PKP’s list of active OJS journals, and linked 714 more to sources we already had. Every OJS journal’s source now carries an is_ojs flag, so you can list them all with filter=is_ojs:true.Harvesting the journals themselves. We now harvest a journal’s own OAI-PMH feed wherever Crossref doesn’t already deliver its articles. Those copies are labelled as what they are: publisher-hosted versions of record.Better OA labels. OJS journals new to OpenAlex are open access by default, so 1.2 million of their articles now show as diamond OA. When we checked a sample of their article pages, we found no paywalls.What we’re still missing2,778 OJS journals still have no articles in OpenAlex, and more are incomplete. The biggest obstacle is access: some journal servers block our harvester. We’ve written to the technical contacts of more than 700 OJS hosts to ask them to let it in, and the first have already done so.If you run an OJS journal, please allow our harvester and keep your technical contact email current. If your journal is missing from OpenAlex or looks wrong, email support@openalex.org with its ISSN, and we’ll take a look.The post OpenAlex covers nearly every OJS journal appeared first on OpenAlex blog.

blog.openalex.org

Yvonne Fischer: This article by Yvonne Fischer presents “QueerBib – so queer wie ihr”, an ongoing project at Cologne Public Library that aims to systematically anchor queer perspectives in both the collection and programming. The project runs year-round, with a particular focus each June. Fischer outlines how the initiative emerged, how it has been implemented so far, and which structural and practical challenges the team has encountered. The report highlights strategies for increasing queer visibility, lessons learned from collaboration and community feedback, and initial indicators of impact, offering guidance and reflections for other libraries seeking to foster queer-inclusive practice.

doi.org

Should OpenAlex publish a novelty score? A vibe check

Kyle Demes: When people want to know whether a piece of research is any good, they usually have two options: ask an expert, or count citations. Both have well-known problems. Expert review is slow, expensive, subjective, and does not scale to portfolios of thousands of papers. Citations take years to accumulate, reward the already well-cited, and say more about whether a paper was used than whether it said anything new.That second gap is the interesting one. Creative work, including scientific discovery, is generally understood to be both new and useful. Citations are a reasonable proxy for usefulness. We have had no widely trusted, scalable measure for new. Funders say they want novel research, and then evaluate it with tools that cannot see novelty.Earlier this year an international challenge set out to change that, and the winning approach now exists as a working prototype. We are considering adding a novelty score to OpenAlex. Before we write a spec or scope resources to implement it, we want to know whether you would use it, what for, and what would make you trust it.The challengeThe Metascience Novelty Indicators Challenge was launched in September 2025 by the UK Metascience Unit at UK Research and Innovation; designed by the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex and RAND Europe; and operated by Challenge Works. Teams were asked to build a tool that could assess the novelty of a research paper at the time of publication.To evaluate the entries, SPRU built a ground-truth dataset the hard way: a random sample of recent publications across all disciplines (drawn from OpenAlex), each rated for novelty by human experts in the relevant field who were provided with the full text. Challenge entrants never saw those ratings. Their indicators were scored on how closely they matched the experts’, and the evaluators were blinded to who had submitted what.The winner, announced just a few months ago in June 2026, was a team from Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany: Jan Göpfert, Samuel Kieling, Jann Weinand, Titan Hartono, and Patrick Kuckertz. Their approach came top on most evaluation criteria (in a “winner of winners approach”), and they received a £300,000 prize, provided by Coefficient Giving, to develop it further.Coverage: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01882-7 and https://www.science.org/content/article/how-novel-research-paper-competition-quantify-concept-crowns-winner.How the Jülich indicator worksMost existing novelty indicators work from metadata: unusual combinations of references, keywords, or journals. The Jülich indicator reads the paper instead.It uses a large language model to analyse the study and a selection of the works it cites, and from those, it reconstructs the state of knowledge at the time of publication, including the open questions in the field. It then asks what the focal study contributes anew: an original method, a surprising result, or a solution to a problem that was previously unsolved. It deliberately collects arguments for and against the paper’s novelty and weighs them. The output is a score from 0 to 100, an interval showing how confident the model is, and a written justification that a reader can check.Jülich press release: https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/news/archive/press-release/2026/ai-identifies-scientific-novelty-julich-team-wins-international-challengeThe team is clear that this is a support for human judgement rather than a replacement for it, and that a score which could be gamed, or which quietly disadvantaged some fields or languages, would be worse than no score at all. Those are our concerns too.Why OpenAlex is interested, and what it would takeOpenAlex already carries citation counts, topics, and a growing set of work-level signals (e.g., field-weighted citation impact). A novelty score that is transparent, reproducible, and available for every work, free, in the same place, would be a genuinely new thing for funders, institutions, journals, and researchers to work with. The UK Metascience Unit has told us that it would be of interest to a large proportion of the roughly 100 research teams it funds, as well as to UKRI’s own analysts. And we would rather that such a novelty indicator be built in the open than watch it appear behind a paywall.It is not a small undertaking, and the open questions are the reason for this post:How far back? Scoring every work in OpenAlex is very different from scoring everything published since, say, 2019.Which works? Journal articles only, or preprints, conference papers, book chapters, and dissertations as well? The indicator was validated so far only on journal articles. Maybe that’s enough (after all, FWCI only applies to a few work types), but maybe it’s worth the effort to evaluate the indicator in a broader set of work types first. One-off or continuous? A static file scored once is much cheaper than a live score that updates as new works arrive and as records change. A live production database like OpenAlex really wants the latter, but maybe the community only needs static scores, updated yearly.Open-weight or commercial models? Open-weight LLMs would make the scores reproducible over the long term and could run on public research computing. Jülich is testing whether they perform as well.Cost and compute. Running a language model over hundreds of millions of works is a significant compute bill, however it is done. That’s why answers to the questions above are especially important before we fully spec this out.Transparency versus gaming. Publishing the full method makes the score checkable and makes it easier to write to. Where should the line sit and is that an argument for static historic application vs. on-going scoring of the indicator against new works?Use in evaluation. A score built to describe a literature can be misused to judge individuals. What safeguards would you want before it existed at all?What we are askingThis is a vibe check with a light-touch questionnaire, not a full consultation. We want enough signal on demand and scope to write a spec and a resourcing case, and we will go deeper later if the response warrants it.Fill in the form. About six questions, five minutes, any language. It stays open until Friday 13 November 2026.https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScOlmbDN7AdJic8jHO1dnQWMhppFIrMK96J0s6TmcU1oME3ZQ/viewform?usp=publish-editorJoin the webinar. Wednesday 7 October 2026, 8:00 to 9:00am Pacific (11am Eastern, 4pm UK, 5pm Central Europe). Ben Steyn (UK Metascience Unit) on why the challenge was run, Jan Göpfert (Jülich) on how the indicator works, and Kyle Demes (OpenAlex) on what integrating it into OpenAlex would look like, followed by half an hour of questions. Sarah Otner (SPRU) will be on hand for questions about the evaluation. Recording and slides posted afterwards.https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_EetlA-l3QgK2FvQVxE0GLgPass it on. Funders, research offices, metascience groups, tool builders, and anyone who has ever wished that citations told them something they do not.What happens nextWe will share a synthesis of the responses with the UK Metascience Unit and the Jülich team in late November, and publish a summary here. If there is clear demand and a workable scope, the next step is a spec and a scoped first run. If there is not, we will say so and keep the door open.Thanks in advance for any input you share. If you have any other questions about this initiative, let me know at: kyle@openalex.org The post Should OpenAlex publish a novelty score? A vibe check appeared first on OpenAlex blog.

blog.openalex.org

Ekkehard Henschke: This brief German‑language piece by Ekkehard Henschke announces and contextualizes his review of Michael Knoche’s 2026 monograph “Revolution im Leseland,” published by Wallstein. The book examines how academic libraries in the former GDR reshaped their structures, collections, and mandates after the fall of the Berlin Wall, tracing institutional, political, and cultural transformations. Henschke’s article appears in the journal “Bibliothek – Forschung und Praxis” and is available open access via De Gruyter. While the text offers no formal abstract, it signals a critical engagement with Knoche’s account of post‑socialist library reorganization and its broader implications.

doi.org

Michael Seadle: This German-language article by Michael Seadle reviews the edited collection “Knowledge, Reading and Culture: Studies in Information Practice,” part of the series Current Topics in Library and Information Practice (De Gruyter, 2026). Seadle discusses the volume’s contributions to library and information science, especially how it addresses knowledge creation, reading as an information practice, and the cultural frameworks shaping both. He evaluates the range and quality of the included studies, considering their theoretical grounding, empirical methods, and relevance for practitioners. The review situates the book within ongoing debates on information behavior and the future of library services.

doi.org

Satire auf Donald Trump: »South Park« heißt jetzt »South America«

DIE ZEIT: Film - Sarah Kohler: Die Gründer von »South Park« benennen die Satireserie um. Künftig heißt sie »South America«, schrieben Trey Parker und Matt Stone, und kritisierten Google und Apple.

zeit.de

European democracies are running out of time to turn away from the abyss | Rafael Behr

Rafael Behr: Far-right parties, Maga ideology and Kremlin money are conniving to suffocate liberal idealism for another generationNot all that long ago, Europe was a beacon of liberal idealism. One memoir recalls it as an era “comfortably saturated with confidence in the unfailing and binding power of tolerance and conciliation”. The economic system seemed obviously preferable to barbarous alternatives. “People honestly believed that the divergencies and the boundaries between nations and sects would gradually melt away into a common humanity,” the author added.Those words could describe the spirit of globalisation at the turn of the millennium. They were written in the 1930s by Stefan Zweig, reflecting on the optimism of late 19th-century Vienna from the perspective of a Jewish émigré whose world had been destroyed by murderous nationalism. Zweig took his own life in 1942. He never saw fascism defeated. He couldn’t have imagined a renaissance of liberalism in the second half of the 20th century so complete as to attain a pitch of complacency rivalling the one he remembered from his childhood. Continue reading...© Illustration: Anaïs Mims/Getty© Illustration: Anaïs Mims/Getty© Illustration: Anaïs Mims/Getty

theguardian.com

Angriff auf Protest: Mann durch Schüsse auf Anti-AfD-Demonstration in Halle leicht verletzt

DIE ZEIT: Deutschland - Theresa Walter: Ein Unbekannter schoss nach der Landtagswahl auf die Teilnehmer einer Anti-AfD-Demonstration in Halle. Ein Mensch wurde verletzt, der Staatsschutz ermittelt.

zeit.de

GitHub - jmiba/Aurora-SDG-Publication-Classifier: Explore, enrich, classify, and visualize institutional publications from OpenAlex and DSpace with Aurora SDG models, caching, charts, and CSV/XLSX exp...

Explore, enrich, classify, and visualize institutional publications from OpenAlex and DSpace with Aurora SDG models, caching, charts, and CSV/XLSX export. - jmiba/Aurora-SDG-Publication-Classifier

github.com

Ukrainian publishers call for support after Russian attacks destroy 10m books

Emma Loffhagen: The country risks ‘the collapse of the entire book ecosystem’ following destruction of warehouses in July and August, say Ukrainian publishersThe Ukrainian Book Institute has called on the international publishing community to support Ukrainian publishers after Russian attacks in July and early August destroyed about 10m books and a significant share of the country’s book production capacity.The institute said the attacks on publishing, printing and warehouse infrastructure had left some companies at risk of financial collapse. A major attack on 1 August hit warehouses belonging to the RNK-Ranok publishing group in Kharkiv, destroying approximately 8m books, following July attacks in Kyiv which led to the loss of more than 1.5m books. In all, the recent attacks have led to the destruction of approximately 30% of the volume of books produced annually in Ukraine. Continue reading...© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

theguardian.com

Bauhaus: Breites Bündnis veröffentlicht »Bauhaus-Manifest« gegen Nationalismus

DIE ZEIT: Deutschland - Hella Kemper: Kulturschaffende, Museen und Kirchen setzen sich im »Bauhaus-Manifest« für eine weltoffene Kunst und Gesellschaft ein. Initiator ist Kulturstaatsminister Wolfram Weimer.

zeit.de

Bauhaus: Breites Bündnis veröffentlicht »Bauhaus-Manifest« gegen Nationalismus

DIE ZEIT: Deutschland - Hella Kemper: Kulturschaffende, Museen und Kirchen setzen sich im »Bauhaus-Manifest« für eine weltoffene Kunst und Gesellschaft ein. Initiator ist Kulturstaatsminister Wolfram Weimer.

zeit.de

Charlotte Knobloch: Charlotte Knobloch fordert Prüfung von AfD-Verbotsverfahren

DIE ZEIT: Deutschland - Yannick von Eisenhart Rothe: Die Holocaust-Überlebende Knobloch sieht Parallelen zwischen AfD und NSDAP. Zu einem Verbotsverfahren sagt sie: »Alles, was helfen könnte, sollte versucht werden.«

zeit.de

Libanon: Libanon schafft als erstes Land im Nahen Osten die Todesstrafe ab

DIE ZEIT: Ausland - Marla Noss: Erst gestern wurde im Libanon noch die Todesstrafe verhängt. Heute schaffte das Parlament sie ab. Justizminister Adel Nassar sieht darin eine historische Entscheidung.

zeit.de

Think our basic rights are safe? In the age of oligarchs and corporate lobbying, think again | George Monbiot

George Monbiot: The global assault on our freedoms is coming ever closer to home. Just look at the sinister prosecution of UK lawyer Rajiv MenonNo more resistance in the US. The era of human rights is over, and dissent is once more forbidden. This is what certain billionaires and their concierges want, and this is the model they’re also seeking to project across the world. If we fail to resist, if our new prime minister is as weak and suggestible as the last one, this is what we will get. In fact, we are halfway there already.Why? Because successive governments in the UK have succumbed to a global campaign to cancel our fundamental freedoms, a campaign led by oligarchs and corporations, the media they own and the junktanks they fund. A campaign that has become definitional for the second Trump presidency. Continue reading...© Illustration: Thomas Pullin/The Guardian© Illustration: Thomas Pullin/The Guardian© Illustration: Thomas Pullin/The Guardian

theguardian.com

When affiliation errors become a research security problem

Kyle Demes: TL;DR. Research security screening checks author affiliations against lists of organizations of concern, using bibliometric data. Affiliation matching is imperfect, though, especially for companies and small institutes with short names or no ROR record, so a researcher can end up linked to an organization they have no connection to. As a first pass we cross-referenced the major watch lists to ROR and cleaned up 6,191 such over-merges across 192 listed organizations. We invite the research security community to collaborate with us to improve OpenAlex and use bibliometric data responsibly for this use case.Research security screening is now routine. Funders, universities, and commercial compliance tools check author affiliations against government lists of organizations of concern (e.g., entities flagged for military, defence, or sanctions reasons). The lists are public and the screening is increasingly required. One part of that screening process often relies on affiliation data from research publications. The general idea is to ask: has the research team been associated with organizations of concern directly (i.e., they worked for or were funded by them) or indirectly (through their networks of collaborators). A positive match in a bibliometric database then triggers follow-up scrutiny to determine if the connection is real and the risks associated with the connection. Anyone who has worked with affiliation data knows that it can get messy. To demonstrate the problem, the University of British Columbia has almost 200,000 distinct text strings that have been used in publications to refer to the University, covering departments, addresses, translations, typos, text encoding issues from publishers, and more. Here are a few examples:“The University of British Columbia”“UBC”“Univ of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada”“University of Brtish Columbia, Vancouver, Canada”“University of British Colombia#TAB#”And so algorithmic approaches are used to associate these text strings with institutions in the Research Organization Registry. Research information databases each have their own processes for doing this. We make our source code openly available, and you can find our methods detailed on github. But long story short, we have linked over 150M unique text strings to 130k unique institutions. These algorithms generally work well, with >98% precision and >90% recall for most academic institutions. But across the full corpus of all scholarly works in OpenAlex (500M ), that’s still millions of errors.These errors can be especially acute for companies or small research institutes because they may have very few publications to train the matching model and they often have short names that are common words. Consider the example of the company “Optical Sciences”. They have a ROR record because they publish research, but they get erroneously associated with the Optical Sciences Center of the University of Arizona which does not have its own ROR record.Most bibliometricians are accustomed to navigating these errors in their analyses, and some even know how to fix them upstream (e.g., curating ROR records and string matching in OpenAlex). On the other hand, research security professionals come from diverse backgrounds and only sometimes have a nuanced technical understanding of bibliometric databases. That means an affiliation error that used to be a minor data-quality annoyance can now hold up a grant, trigger a foreign-influence review, or put a researcher into a compliance inquiry over a relationship that never existed.A first pass at minimizing false positivesWe took the published watch lists that screening actually runs against (Canada’s Named Research Organizations, the US Department of Defense 1260H list, the US Consolidated Screening List including the BIS Entity List, US OFAC, the US UFLPA list, the UK FCDO sanctions list, and Australia’s DFAT list) and cross-referenced each entity to ROR with a strict country-consistency check. That produced a verified crosswalk of 192 organizations covering roughly 4.24 million works.Then, for each organization, we screened every affiliation string linked to it, about 2.5 million in all, looking for this specific failure: an unrelated company or institution absorbed into a listed entity because their names collide (often with an organization lacking a ROR record). We found 6,191 such over-merges, roughly a quarter of one percent of those strings, and we submitted manual curations to remove the linkages. The scale of the collision problem is easier to see in a few real examples than to describe.A small US biotechnology firm, identified on its papers by a short name only that also refers to a broad class of medical interventions, was linked to a Russian research institute whose registered acronym is nearly identical. The two have nothing to do with each other. The firm simply had no ROR record, so the closest-looking acronym won.System Equipments Div., Asahi Engineering Co., Ltd, a Japanese engineering company, was linked to a Chinese entity on the BIS Entity List whose registered name is essentially “System Equipment.”ENGINEERING-PHYSICS, INC. was linked to a Russian Institute of Engineering Physics that appears on these lists, on the strength of the shared words alone.None of these organizations has any connection to the listed entity it was linked to. In each case the two names are close enough that you can see why an algorithm reached for the wrong one because no record existed for the real organization. This work helps reduce these errors, but they still exist.Advice to analysts doing the screeningIf you’re an analyst in charge of screening research applications for potential connections with a list of organizations of concern, never assume that a bibliometric match is a definitive signal of a connection. A match can help you shorten your list of connections to confirm manually, but there are errors and you need to confirm any potential connections. You can do that easily by inspecting the raw_affiliation_string field in the OpenAlex API. For instance: https://api.openalex.org/works/w3134510327 -> raw_affiliation_string : “Optical Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA”. You can also visit the publication’s landing page or PDF for more information directly from the source. All of that information is linked conveniently in the OpenAlex record.You should also take efforts to identify false negatives. For instance, if the organization of concern does not have a ROR record (or doesn’t have enough information on how the organization represents itself in publications), then we won’t be able to make any matches to that institution. More broadly, I highly recommend that you connect with experts in this field on how to successfully leverage bibliometric tools in your work while respecting their limitations. Advice to researchers submitting to screeningsTake a look in OpenAlex in advance to see if there might be issues in your author profile (my profile below). Sometimes another authors’ works might have snuck into your author profile which you can edit that there directly. And sometimes there are errors in affiliation attribution even when the work is yours (like in the examples above). When that happens, the quickest way to get it sorted out is to send details in an email to support@openalex.org. But keep in mind that funders and analysts use different databases and tools for research security compliance workflows and many of them use closed, proprietary databases you won’t be able to access. Let’s work on this togetherIf you work in research security, or at a funder or institution that screens affiliations, we want to hear from you.Screening decisions carry real weight, so the data behind them should be open to inspection. In OpenAlex every affiliation link traces back to the source publication, every correction is public and permanent, and the code that makes the matches is on GitHub (github.com/ourresearch). Nothing sits in a proprietary index that no one outside the vendor can check. When a match is wrong you can see why, contest it, and get it fixed, and that fix then helps everyone who screens after you. For a decision that can affect a researcher’s funding or reputation, that is not a small difference. Open access to the data also means scrutiny is not gated by budget: a well-resourced agency and an under-resourced one work from the same public record.We do not think we have this solved. We know some of the limits and we are certain there are more we have not found. What we want is to work with people who do this screening every day to map those limits honestly, so nobody treats a match as more certain than it is, and to build the documentation and tooling that would make an open, auditable corpus genuinely good infrastructure for this work. A few experts collaborating with us in the open could improve it for the whole community, globally.Get in touch at kyle@openalex.org.The post When affiliation errors become a research security problem appeared first on OpenAlex blog.

blog.openalex.org

David Scheffer, Mohammad Zahurul Islam: The article by David Scheffer and Mohammad Zahurul Islam analyzes how AI-based automated text analysis can infer individual and collective behavior by detecting implicit motives in written texts. Building on their 2021 study, the authors assess how large language models have transformed this field, amplifying both its predictive power and ethical stakes. They highlight new challenges introduced by generative AI, including privacy, manipulation, opacity and misuse at scale. To navigate these tensions, the paper draws on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, arguing for a virtue-based, “golden mean” approach that balances innovation, responsibility and respect for human autonomy.

doi.org

Leon Eppinger, Lisann Kanzler, Pia Reinhold, Sophie Tertel: This English-language article by Leon Eppinger, Lisann Kanzler, Pia Reinhold and Sophie Tertel reports on the deployment of two Pepper humanoid robots at TH Wildau, one of which has been used continuously in the university library’s public services since 2018. Based on several years of practice, the authors describe concrete application scenarios and document how different target groups have responded to the robots. The report highlights both opportunities and limitations and offers insights into how humanoid robots can be meaningfully integrated into library settings to support services, engagement and innovation rather than serving as mere novelties.

doi.org

Erik Senst, Dana-Kristin Mah: This article reports results from the 2025 MIKS pilot study on students’ media and information literacy at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Based on an online survey of 446 students, it analyzes how AI-based applications are used in university studies, how students assess their own AI competencies, and what they expect from higher education institutions. The findings highlight the need to systematically integrate AI skills into curricula and into library support services. Although the pilot’s generalizability is limited, it offers important impulses for institutional development and strategic planning around teaching, learning, and academic support in the age of AI.

doi.org

Kulturinstitutionen fordern digitales Langzeitarchiv für Deutschland

Enrico Giardina: Wenn es nach Nationalbibliothek und Bundesarchiv geht, soll ab nächstem Jahr ein zentraler, souveräner Datenspeicher für das nationale Kulturerbe entstehen.

heise.de

Conrad Hübler: The article presents ALIMA (AI-powered Library Indexing and Metadata Assignment), a prototype system designed to support subject indexing of new acquisitions in academic libraries. Developed at the University Library of TU Bergakademie Freiberg since January 2025, ALIMA uses Large Language Models to suggest controlled subject headings from the Integrated Authority File (GND) and assign classifications such as DK and RVK. To mitigate hallucinations while preserving indexing quality, the system employs a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach that relies on database queries via standardized APIs. The paper reports the current development status and first qualitative experiences from practical testing.

doi.org

b.i.t. News-Ticker - Die Zeit ist reif - Perspektiven zum wissenschaftsgeleiteten Publizieren

b-i-t-online.de

Kevin Kelly's plan for the smallest library to restart civilization

Ellsworth Toohey: In the 1950s, while helping invent computers, John Von Neumann was puzzling over the minimum requirements for a self-reproducing machine. Kevin Kelly has been asking the same question about civilization: what is the smallest library that could restart it — one whose contents include instructions for making a copy of itself? — Read the rest The post Kevin Kelly's plan for the smallest library to restart civilization appeared first on Boing Boing.

boingboing.net

Karsten Engel: This article examines how academic libraries can structure and govern their AI-related activities within university governance frameworks, drawing on experiences at the University of Basel. Engel compares three organizational models: a central AI coordination office, an AI working group, and a decentralized approach embedded in existing structures. For each model, he analyzes roles, advantages, and limitations in terms of strategic alignment, expertise, and institutional influence. The article argues that neither purely centralized nor purely decentralized solutions are sufficient. Instead, hybrid arrangements combining coordination, community building, and local autonomy best enable libraries to represent their interests and shape AI development effectively.

doi.org