Reece Barlow

@reece-barlow.bsky.social

Biology PhD Dropout Ex-OA Publisher I write (sometimes badly) as The Tatler for @scholarlyletter.bsky.social Interested in publishing, knowledge production, research practices and scholarship in general. Not an academic, but I am a scholar.

Academia in 2025: For weeks I’ve been working through botched copy-edits of my monograph, outsourced by the publisher to a company I’d never heard of, until it finally dawned on me the terrible job might be AI. A quick search confirmed the company recently launched new AI software, which now means..

it seems elitist to say something like "not everyone should go to university". but honestly, the high numbers of quasi-academics graduating every year who only go to university to boost their earning prospects is the reason why everyone writes their essays using ChatGPT #academicsky 1/5

Trying to talk about scholarly stuff on algorithm driven platforms low-key feels quite dangerous. like you're never far away from someone who thinks that science is all a sham or that the only thing worth researching is physics and maths twisting the message to match their view. #academicsky

For information to count as knowledge, it must be written down. You can't cite a conversation with a colleague, but you can cite a journal article that you talked about. The unchecked power of the written word has shaped how we know and also what we count as knowing: a thread. 1/5 #academicsky

What knowledge is the most worthy? In a 1939 essay, Flexner passionately argued for the value of curiosity driven research. As I read it, two things occurred to me: 1. of course research is driven by curiosity 2. “curiosity” seems to have vanished from the discourse on research. #academicsky 1/4

Not a traditional academic, still a scholar. I'm an ex-Biology PhD student who dropped out after 10 months and then spent 2 years in Open Access publishing. At the moment, I write about the things that shaped my journey: knowledge production, publishing, science. #academicsky