Ian Mulvany

Hi, I'm Ian - I work on academic publishing systems. You can find out more about me at mulvany.net. I'm always interested in engaging with folk on these topics, if you have made your way here don't hesitate to reach out if there is anything you want to share, discuss, or ask for help with!
February 2, 2025

Thought on Paul Kedrosky's four ideas - 2nd February edition

https://paulkedrosky.com/four-ideas-sunday-edition-17/ • US problems continue, instability in government, and decline in reading standards. • US Tech has stronger dependence on international markets than any other US industry. • Indicators continue for shift in energy landscape. • Overall picture is one of uncertainty, but where there ...
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February 2, 2025

Notes on Paul Kedrosky’s weekly email - Jan 26th edition.

https://paulkedrosky.com/four-ideas-sunday-edition-16/ • The set of short economic indicators at the top of the newsletter are all pointing negative. • US mobility and hiring rates are both very low, a bearish indicator. • Other indicators are around global instability. • One highlight - India is having increased power demands as its e...
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January 31, 2025

Jan 2025 Interesting links

A list of things I found interesting on the web in January. Where will AI be at the end of 2027? A bet by Gary Marcus “If there exist AI systems that can perform 8 of the 10 tasks below by the end of 2027, as determined by our panel of judges, Gary will donate $2,000 to a charity of Miles’ choice; if AI can do fewer than 8, Miles will ...
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January 28, 2025

Some job postings

Research Scientist by Centre for open science. The project will elaborate a conceptual framework for how the research process is conducted and evaluated (e.g., study design, conduct, analysis, interpretation) and different researcher personas (e.g., peer review, replication, and discovery) to develop specific tasks that can be benchmar...
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January 28, 2025

Why I Blog - The 2025 Edition

I am picking up a bit of steam around writing for my blog, so it’s a good moment to reflect on why I blog—or at least why I seem to be blogging at the moment. My reasons are not wildly different from anyone else’s who blogs, I imagine. 1. Help Me Think I find it useful to write about things in order to help me think about them. On that...
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January 23, 2025

A smattering of AI news - Jan 2024

• More robust document references in Claude https://www.anthropic.com/news/introducing-citations-api • OpenAI can now drive a web browser (US only) - https://openai.com/index/introducing-operator/ • OpenAI is looking to lead an investment of $500B in infrastructure in the US (they should put that into NIH funding) • Chinese model R1 dr...
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January 23, 2025

In Publishing Webinar

I’ll be taking part in a webinar for In Publishing on AI next Tuesday - if you are interested you can register here - https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/6293426879838177120. It's a great panel of experts, and the following will also be on the call: * Jennifer Schivas, CEO of 67 Bricks (Data monetisation) * Markus Karlsson, CEO a...
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January 17, 2025

First experiment with GPT tasks - a potential tool for research workflows.

I got access to GPT tasks this week and decided to see if I could make a task. Unlike an RSS feed, or a Google Scholar alert, I'm assuming that this does a broad web search. Something like this could become a useful addition to workflows that needed regular updates, if one got to a place where one was happy with the black box that was ...
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January 15, 2025

Some memories of Cat Williams

I had this amazing AirBnB in San Francisco once, it was back in the day, before it seemed like things might be falling apart. On the hill, it had floor to ceiling full fronted glass wall with a stunning view out over the Oakland bridge. It must have been 2012, 2013 or thereabouts. It was an open science meeting or one kind or another. ...
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January 12, 2025

Notes on four ideas - Paul Kedrosky - Jan 12th edition.

So my view on the January 12th edition is that it is telling us: • Economic movement and growth continues, irrespective of current climate crises in California, but food industry will be a point of pain here. • US is a significant outlier in terms of drug related deaths, reaffirming structural issues in the US. • Data science related j...
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January 12, 2025

Some reads about what is going on with social media right now.

I had dinner last night with some good friends and over the course of many topics of discussion the current state of social media came up. I found the following articles insightful. If I have one take at all about all of this, I think I would say that when we talk about these systems it is incredibly hard to get to grips with their sca...
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January 11, 2025

Addressing Research Integrity with Ringgold

Addressing Research Integrity with Ringgold by CCC I’d somehow missed this— but CCC is creating a service to help identify researchers and their affiliations. This is a problem that is evergreen, in that I’ve seen various implementations going back a number of years, from biomedexperts (if I recall correctly, the founders went on to la...
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January 5, 2025

Notes on four ideas - Paul Kedrosky - Jan 5th edition.

#kedrosky #trends I subscribe to the weekly newsletter from Paul Ketrosky - https://paulkedrosky.com/). He has built a system to scan a lot of news sources and pull out what he classifies as important trends in the news over the previous seven days (he has a daily feed for paid subscribers). It’s possible to just look at them as static...
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January 4, 2025

Questions for a better life.

I liked this article by Oliver Burkeman - https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jan/04/asking-yourself-a-simple-question-can-transform-the-way-you-think-about-your-life-oliver-burkeman I like the idea that if I can ask the right questions my life can be better, do those questions act as incantations and could I just invoke that...
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January 1, 2025

What things might be true about scholarly publishing?

tags: #research #scholarly-publishing Dear reader, I have been blogging for a long time. More often than not, I am writing for myself, mostly my future self, but I am aware that just over 140 folk have subscribed to get updates for my blog, and I am grateful for your attention. I tend to decide to send email alerts for posts that are m...
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December 31, 2024

Interesting links found in December.

Dec 2024 Interesting Links My approach to running a link blog by Simon Willison “Sharing interesting links with commentary is a low effort, high value way to contribute to internet life at large.” I get a lot of value out of flowing interesting links that people post, and this post by Simon inspired me to create a custom apple shortcut...
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December 29, 2024

All my blog posts.

After getting injured on my first day of skiing, I had a bit more time on my hands than anticipated over the holidays. I noticed that this blog has an RSS feed, but it's only for recent items. I've also been blogging across many different platforms over many years, and didn't have an easy way to see all of the posts that I've written. ...
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December 26, 2024

Where do emotions belong in the workplace? - Everywhere!

I drafted this post a good while back, and never got around to posting it. Now that we are heading towards the end of the year, I’m going through my old drafts. Some time ago I did some leadership coaching and in that worked through the role of feelings and how they can enhance or limit our views of ourselves. At that time the followin...
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December 26, 2024

data showing AI productivity gains in materials science

This preprint - Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation* - https://aidantr.github.io/files/AI_innovation.pdf from Aidan Toner Rogers at MIT https://economics.mit.edu/people/phd-students/aidan-toner-rodgers indicates that AI may be having a beneficial impact in materials science research. The preprint looks...
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December 22, 2024

Where infrastructure grows naturally, there, there may be opportunity.

Many folks have tried to build the article of the future (myself included), with the starting point of the research article. We know for sure that technology now supports integration of data, code, and narrative, and we know for certain that researchers work with a variety of complex tools, only to at the end distill them into the pape...
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December 22, 2024

My notes on the Ithaka report

I finally sat down to read through the Ithaka report on GenAI and scholarly publishing. Even though the state of the art has moved on a lot since the interviews were conducted, I still highly recommend reading this report, it's very well written: https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/a-third-transformation/#post-321519-footnote-1 I used m...
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December 22, 2024

"The truth infrastructure of the web"

I first heard this phrase at the start of November at the annual NEC publishing conference, by Fiona Romero a director at the Wikimedia foundation, in her talk - "Knowledge is Human: How Wikimedians are engaging with AI". I love this phrase, and I think it describes so well what scholarly publishing is here for. It's an idea that has b...
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December 21, 2024

Impact indicators, and clarivate.

I just had a quick read through https://clarivate.com/academia-government/blog/introducing-a-comprehensive-framework-for-evaluating-the-societal-impact-of-research/. I have two immediate thoughts. 1) It gives me the heebie jeebies that clarivate are doing this, while at the same time it is very clear why they are. By virtue of their ma...
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December 19, 2024

Why I Disagree (and Agree) with This Take on Science and Open Access

I started off not liking this post at all, but then warmed to it towards the end: https://retractionwatch.com/2024/10/21/reflecting-on-research-misconduct-whats-next-for-the-watcher-community/ I think the main gist is that science may operate in a way that is different from the way some people think it operates and if that is the case,...
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December 19, 2024

Preprint validation.

I like the authors of this piece a lot, but the piece itself doesn’t say very much at all. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2024/11/13/preprints-at-a-crossroads-are-we-compromising-openness-for-credibility/. It does make me think that preprint servers should be the crucible for experimenting with every possible type of au...
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December 17, 2024

GPT’s view on - What Have We Learned from Subscribe to Open? | Katina Magazine

https://katinamagazine.org/content/article/open-knowledge/2024/what-have-we-learned-from-subscribe-to-open I was not sure what to make of the above piece about subscribe to open, it’s not a model that I know very well. So I asked GPT O1 to do a critical read of this piece and the below seems fair. : From the evidence in the text, Subsc...
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December 17, 2024

two reports that I was interviewed for

As we get to the end of 2025 I want to link to two reports that I was interviewed for over the last year. The first looks at future health trends, looking out to 2035. https://www.thelinusgroup.com/health-2035 The "Health 2035" report shifts focus from technology-driven solutions to the perspectives of young physicians, the future lead...
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December 10, 2024

Do we need a trust credit agency in scholarly publishing?

If you work in scholarly publishing, in any capacity really, I think you should go and read the recent report from STM on trust and identity - https://stm-assoc.org/new-stm-report-trusted-identity-in-academic-publishing/. I have been thinking about the role of identity, and identity verification, in our industry for a few weeks now, an...
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December 4, 2024

STM innovations winner - Knowledge Gate Group

https://www.knowledgegategroup.com/#platform won the Vesalius innovation - https://karger.com/pages/vesalius-innovation-award. They create a network to connect experts with those who need access to that expertise. I love this idea. I've worked on a few ideas like this in the past - Nature Network had some elements to it, we kicked some...
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November 27, 2024

Some interesting looking LLM tools

HumanLayer API and SDK for integrating human oversight into AI workflows, enabling approvals and feedback via platforms like Slack and email. LangChain Framework for building applications with large language models, offering tools for reasoning, data integration, and context-aware agents. ChainForge Open-source tool for prompt engineer...
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