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:

If I may nitpick, journals don't cite anything, authors that publish articles in journals do.

Open Access Tracking Project@oatp.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy · 2d ago

[2607.25220v1] Preprints Without Curation Are Increasingly Cited by Journals https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25220v1

The kind of things that academics should do to have "impact": small cheap paper books aiming at a large audience to help them grasp complex & technical matters.

Béatrice Cointe@beatricecointe.bsky.social · 6d ago

Coming soon www.premierparallele.fr/livre/manuel... @premierparallele.bsky.social

Excellent thread of comments on PubPeer if you want to see how, in scientific work, just a different interpretational move can lead to the opposite conclusion...

Dorothy Bishop@deevybee.bsky.social · 3d ago

I've been digging in to the Packalen and Bhattacharya paper on "edge science". They seem to have run the analysis on 1 million articles but the dataset has 6.2 million. There may be a good reason for this, but I can't find it in the paper, so have asked on PubPeer. pubpeer.com/publications...

Monthly review of the coverage of the main bibliometric tools

As we all know, commercial journals (whether subscription or Gold APC based) don't rely at all on unpaid authors, unpaid reviewers and un paid editors to make profits.

Alejandro Montenegro@aemonten.bsky.social · last wk.

Exactly, as most Diamond OA journals do. It's not a sustainable or scalable approach as currently implemented. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-afri...

Umberto Eco’s Personal Library Opens to the Public: More Than 32,000 Books, Exactly as He Left Them www.openculture.com/2026/07/umbe...

Umberto Eco’s Personal Library Opens to the Public: More Than 32,000 Books, Exactly as He Left Them

William Weaver could add an extension onto his Tuscan villa, which he called the 'Eco Chamber.' The Biblioteca Eco, or Eco Library, whose ribbon-cutting earlier this month you can see in the Italian n...

openculture.com

For old guys & gals, "The Cost of Knowledge" was the title of the anti-Elsevier petition in 2011 (E. tried to change US federal regulation to its advantage) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cos...

The Cost of Knowledge - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

SPARC@sparcopen.bsky.social · 2w ago

Let us know your plans for #OAWeek 2026! Submit your event and we'll add it to the public calendar. www.openaccessweek.org/submit-event

AI LLM as core capitalism: the business is based on illegal stuff. Companies either push for regulation change ("fair use") or theyjust pay plaintiffs with investor cash.

Martin Paul Eve@eve.gd · 2w ago

Wow. Final judgement in the Anthropic class action is approved. Anthropic will pay $1.5 billion to authors whose works it pirated. The lawyers get $101.56 million (6.8%); a third of what they initially requested. There is a 30-day notice-of-appeal period. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

"don't cite what you haven't read" remains the basic entry level academic responsibility; & if your discpline "doesn't have that as a norm" then sorry, your discipline needs reforming for this new world. Citations are structural parts of trust and knowledge building, not trinkets or optional extras

Miles Klee 🦉@milesklee.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Academics and technologists are sounding the alarm about a growing crisis in scholarship as we know it: AI-generated citations of nonexistent papers that have infested real journals. Despite being fake, the sources are widely assumed to be authentic the more they appear in published literature.

please don't call statisticians "data scientists," they hate that, survey finds www.amstat.org/docs/default...

I randomly discovered Chinarxiv, apparently a platform dedicated to the translation of Chinese-language preprints. #openinfrastructures #openscience Here is an example on #openpeerreview practices in journals. Anyone knows more on the selection and translation process? chinarxiv.org/items/chinax...

Survey and Analysis of the Current Practice of Open Peer Review in Academic Journals

Objective: Through investigation and analysis of a large-scale journal sample, this study aims to depict the current international practice status of open peer review (OPR) in academic journals, addre...

chinarxiv.org

So what is the crime? Is the output of Claude copyrighted? Is Alibaba using Anthropic's product too much? If Alibaba's excessive use of Anthropic is damaging Anthropic's ability to offer their service, then how is that different from AI bots and scrapers effectively DDoSing open repositories?

Olga Nesterova@onestpress.onestnetwork.com · last mo.

Anthropic has accused Chinese tech giant Alibaba of a massive, illicit "distillation attack" to steal Claude’s AI capabilities. In a letter to US officials, they accused Alibaba of running 28.8 million fake conversations with Claude to train a competing AI for free. Alibaba declined to comment.

Another example of the very limited asset that is a Uni Ranking: expecting revenue from foreign students (in Aus and UK), but what else beyond that?

Margot Finn@eicathomefinn.bsky.social · last mo.

Struggling to parse this. Exeter is celebrating its overall global ranking to 136th, comprised (it reports) of 151st (Natural Sciences), 131st (Life Sciences & Medicine) and 76th (Arts & Humanities) while announcing plans to make 25% of Arts & Humanities staff redundant. Does this compute?

Certainly describes my situation: facing redundancy from a humanities job in weeks, no chance of another academic role, and at a university that went from teaching 15-20 languages to none.

Stephen Shapiro@stephenshapiro.bsky.social · last mo.

zeitung.faz.net/data/863/rea...

Truly bizarre story of how two papers from the 1940s by physics pioneer Max Planck have been "retracted" from Naturwissenschaften, potentially by an algorithm, for anachronistic "plagiarism" issues, leaving the current editor baffled (but it is Springer Nature so.... www.science.org/content/arti...

Why have papers by one of history’s most famous physicists been retracted?

Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck. A bot may be to blame

science.org

All conferences should adopt @epidbydesign.bsky.social ‘s question rules as standard! #SER2026

Phase II of China’s Excellence Action Plan highlights the transformation of China’s academic journal publishing model to intensive, cluster-based operations, reduing costs, to improve operational capabilities and industry leadership stm-assoc.org/new-report-p...

Not to diminish our colleague contribution in any way, but 1/ did he get any money from T&F for 50 years of work? 2/ is it a good thing for the community to hold such a position for so long? (and there is to my knowledge no literature on EIC mandates).

Taylor & Francis Research@tandfresearch.bsky.social · 2mo ago

On 3 June, we held a commemorative lunch at Trinity College, Cambridge, to celebrate Professor Ted Davis and his steadfast work for 50 years as Editor-in-Chief of Philosophical Magazine (1975-2025)

As an ALT to the image: "The first sentence of the "published paper" is "Certainly here is a possible introduction for you!". "Publisher value" as they call it #openscience

Sophien Kamoun@kamounlab.bsky.social · 2mo ago

#ELSEVIL strikes again with this beauty. Surfaces and Interfaces: current article processing charge (APC) for Gold Open Access is US$2,290 #sciencecrisis

#Openaccess is supposed to have clear definitions and delimitations since #BOAI in 2001. In a new preprint entitled Open Here, There, and Everywhere? , Louis Bachaud and I compare 30 OA Monitors and prove that almost none of them has the same definitions and typologies. hal.science/hal-05661835

Sigh. A call for papers on the legacy of Aaron Swartz. A most worthwhile topic. But ACM charging APCs for this special issue? Is that in keeping with AS's legacy? In any case, I will not write for it, as I cannot afford the APCs. I will choose a diamond venue instead. dl.acm.org/pb-assets/st...

I never said anything like this, or wrote on this topic. I have achieved the status of generic family sociologist appearing in AI slop articles to say random words. This statement now enters the great corpus of random bullshit our students will copy-paste into eternity. You're welcome.

This is a must read if you want to understand how academics and academic institutions abandon their core missions, letting commercial companies thrive and create a "market" #openscience #publishers

Kevin Sanders@kjsanders.eurosky.social · 2mo ago

'From mission to market: a case study and analysis of the commercialisation of institutional publishing' by @alittleroad.bsky.social, @scholtom.bsky.social, @kirahopkins.bsky.social, @anna-r-hughes.bsky.social & I: doi.org/10.36399/cmn...

Good luck to very talented colleagues who left MDPI publications to run a new journal. Some back story here: polecopub.hypotheses.org/3231

Dealing with the grey zone of publishing or… how I will never be an editorial board member of MDPI Publications.

The "predatory publisher" category raises more questions than answers. Just like "academic fraud", it tends to validate a black & white world in which rules and norms are clear-cut and universally sha...

polecopub.hypotheses.org

Research on Research Association@roration.bsky.social · 2mo ago

We're excited to launch J·ROR, the Journal of Research on Research. A new open-access home for research on how research is funded, organised, conducted, communicated, and evaluated. Our first editorial: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... #ResearchOnResearch #MetaScience #OpenScience #STS

#EconSky: check in on your Google Scholar page. It is not ok. Screenshot is one of three hallucinated articles I found on my profile, clearly a downstream product of someone's AI hallucinations.

We have been unable to reach the author for a comment.

Martin Paul Eve@eve.gd · 2mo ago

Big let down, to be honest

The disinvestment in French Higher Education shown by public data . At Master level, +6% candidates, -13% positions.

Julien Gossa@juliengossa.cpesr.fr · 2mo ago

[ #VeilleESR #Parcoursup ] Retrait des MEEF de la plateforme d'un côté (baisse des formations affichées), démographie de l'autre (hausse des candidatures) : les chiffres #MonMaster montrer des indicateurs contraires et hors norme. www.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/sites/defaul...

If you want to avoid AI Search and metadata shortcomings, you can simply full-text search on 36M works (and counting) with Matilda.

The Scholarly Kitchen@scholarlykitchen.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Guest Post — Scholarly AI Search Shortcomings and the Need for Better Metadata scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/05/29/g...

This is the policy we need at every institution of higher education across faculties. Now.

Nathan Kalman-Lamb@nkalamb.bsky.social · 3mo ago

UC Berkeley Law creates new AI policy that bans AI for "conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit" or exams because "thinking remains the sine qua non of good lawyering (and of a quality legal education)." That's what I'm talking about.