The New School for Social Reserach in NYC is, essentially, killing itself, killing what it was, killing what it stood for. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/n...

He Had Tenure. The New School Laid Him Off Anyway. (Gift Article)

The professor, a longtime critic of the university, was among 19 educators who lost their positions as the institution navigated financial woes.

nytimes.com

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

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:

Appropriately grim stuff from Dawn Neff. medium.com/@dnafus/dear...

Dear Anthropology

There was an event recently at UCL about “future-proofing anthropology.” With the discipline embroiled in every conceivable crisis, and job…

medium.com

"knowing things" is a conspiracy by Big Knowledge to get you to buy more Knowledge

I spent two beautiful weeks in Maine eating lobster, lobster rolls, lobster ravioli, lobster mac, lobster tacos, lobster nachos, etc., but I never found what I was truly looking for: lobster wings.

Reading Edward Deci’s mid-90s pop-psychology book *Why We Do What We Do* for a reading group. It feels like a distillation of 20th C. liberal social science: trying to merge individual flourishing w/ managerial efficiency, effected through reform of how we talk, & “society” is a sus influence.

This book is an unbelievable feat of social research and theory. press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

Addiction by Design

An anthropologist traces the intimate connections between gambling addiction and casino industry design tactics

press.princeton.edu

Q&A with @devezer.bsky.social about metascience, open science, and her work in this area.

Q & A with Berna Devezer

Critical Metascience

markrubin.substack.com

We're 61% of the way there! But we need the support of more libraries to get to 100% - please come and join the @ojcollective.bsky.social community! Have questions or want to arrange a video call? DM us, email info@openjournalscollective.org or visit openjournalscollective.org.

Text mining before the age of LLM training.

The Weekly Read is "Floating Power: Energy, Infrastructure, and South-South Relations" by @drgokcegunel.bsky.social, which analyzes how inventive infrastructure embodies broader imaginations of energy futures. Read it for free thanks to the De Gruyter eBound Foundation. buff.ly/QICbbIj

This post and the accompanying paper are worth reading. There is definitely an interesting lineage of open science that leads from philanthro-capital to present-day "gold standard science", but it's also worth pointing out this is only one lineage in a pretty complicated genealogy of open research.

Jeff Lockhart@jwlockhart.bsky.social · 5d ago

I wrote about science funding, science reform, and anti-science agendas. scatter.wordpress.com/2026/07/31/s...

Look, MIT Press are progressive in OA publishing. Heck, I have published with them and have another book under contract with them. But they always think they are the source of influence, never the influenced. They rarely acknowledge the work of others. www.researchinformation.info/analysis-opi...

Amy Brand: Publishing for a new era - Research Information

EXCLUSIVE: The director and publisher of MIT Press reflects on risk-taking, leadership, innovation and human judgement

researchinformation.info

How do we fix the publishing model so that research is open to all, not driven by metrics and profit. I chatted to @samuelmoore.org for my latest Under Review podcast where he offers possible solutions and throws a few things into the Under Review bin. Watch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub55... 1/2

Under Review with Dr Sam Moore - The Cost of Knowledge: Building an Equitable Open Access Model

YouTube video by Andy Tattersall

youtube.com

I have a new short essay out in LIMN's special issue This Is Not a Platform titled "Platform Obscurantism: The Hidden Substrates of Machine Learning." ChatGPT is a platform. That may be the least interesting thing about it. limn.press/article/plat... 🧵

Platform Obscurantism - Limn

ChatGPT is a platform. The chatbot is infrastructure. Thousands of applications now build on OpenAI’s application programming interface, creating a dependent ecosystem of developers, startups, and ent...

limn.press

Hello there #anthropology fans. During #EASA2026, the new "Handbook on Anthropology and Artificial Intelligence" will be available for 40% off hardcover with coupon code below during the conference (which is now). There is confusing talk of Open Access, which I will update when I know more.

NEW POST: 'Wiley’s Acquisition of Emerald: Some observations from Copim': copim.pub/wileys-acqui... The post explores issues of scale and corporate consolidation in academic publishing raised by the acquisition, heightened by the emphasis on the anticipated role of #AI. #Scale #AcademicPublishing

Wiley’s Acquisition of Emerald: Some observations from Copim - Copim

Copim reflects on Wiley’s acquisition of Emerald and the issues of scale and corporate consolidation in academic publishing.

copim.pub

We have heard about the emperor's clothes, but what about the sovereign's appetite? I write about the hungry sovereign: my take on the new data state emerging in India. A tiny peek into the magical year at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton. @alondra.bsky.social limn.press/article/the-...

The Hungry Sovereign - Limn

The paper trails and traps of India’s bureaucracy are legendary. The Indian state is not so much an iron cage as a vast, papyraceous web of documents—certifying a recipient of welfare, a legible citiz...

limn.press

Netherlands' new OA Strategy "explicitly recommends the redirection and reallocation of funds from existing ‘big deal’ budgets towards community-driven alternatives, including university-led diamond open access presses..."

When 'scaling small' becomes national policy

The Netherlands' new open access strategy echoes the principles the Open Book Collective was built on - 'scaling small' and community-led publishing

obc.copim.pub

INSIGHTS: blog.growkudos.com/news/ai-disc... 1/3 researchers are starting their information seeking with AI. One in ten researchers turn directly to AI tools as the starting point for their information seeking; a further 25% start in general search engines where AI-generated answers are now embedded

AI has captured a third of research discovery. Study sets out actions required for publishers to make content visible via new channels.

Understanding how AI changes discovery is no longer optional. This report gives scholarly publishers and platforms insights, actionable recommendations and a strategic roadmap.

blog.growkudos.com

This coffee machine is trolling me.

"Kathryn J. Gindlesparger... [shows] how everyday documents such as meeting minutes, policy drafts, budgets, and accreditation reports can be used to push back against authoritarian and corporate forces that undermine an institution’s mission." (Echoes of Ben Kafka's The Demon of Paperwork 😈)

Paper Pusher

Paperwork is the new protest: leveraging bureaucracy for progressive actionIn contemporary higher education, power increasingly circulates through documents ...

upress.umn.edu

Not to be outdone by neighboring Curaçao . . .

Chatbot as boundary object, meet search engine as boundary object

I'm once again begging everyone to update their priors. "ChatGPT is not a search engine." Yes, yes it is. It actively searches the web based on your prompt, and returns active links relevant to your search/prompt. It's a search engine. It is. (Obvs don't use it that way if that's not your thing)

The incredible Professor John Esposito, Georgetown University, died today. His legacy is immense, and to those of us who knew and worked with him, he will be deeply missed. The world has lost one of the giants of academia. 💔 His life, captured here 2 years ago: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFwd...

The Legacy of John Esposito

YouTube video by ACMCU (ACMCU)

youtube.com

For the entire time I've been on social media after college I've watched the same posts go by about how scientific publishing is broken Just endless academics like, we're all trying to find the guy who did this

Finally getting to read Karen Strassler’s latest book, *Demanding Images.* I was the production editor for a bunch of great books on Indonesia when I was at DukeUP, including Karen’s first book, *Refracted Visions,* by the likes of Eben Kirksey, Abidin Kusno, & Rudolf Mrázek. Some of my favorites.

A beautiful & insightful essay from @quinnslobodian.com about the political structure of the modern tech economy. Ordinary people have both less & more power than we often believe www.theideasletter.org/essay/digita...

Digital Bandung

The recent turn to the language of “digital empire” and “data colonialism” captures aspects of the concentration of technological power, but often mistakes polemic for analysis. Slobodian revisits the...

theideasletter.org