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!
March 9, 2025

First experience with Claude Code

Claude released 3.7 a few weeks ago and along with it they released a command line programming assistant - Claude Code. This was in limited preview on launch but last week was opened up. I tried it out last night and this post describes the outcome. When LLMs came out I started testing by developing a python web app that could use sock...
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March 1, 2025

Feb 2025 Interesting links.

Here are things on the web that I found particularly interesting or insightful in February. Computing inside an AI | Will Whitney by Will Whitney “The metaphors we use constrain the experiences that we build, and model-as-person is keeping us from exploring the full potential of large models.” I hope that this piece is actully somethin...
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February 28, 2025

M&A activity in scholarly publishing, 2021 to 2025, an LLM assisted overview.

I had to put a slide together recently where I wanted to evidence some of consolidation activity taking place in our industry. We all know a lot has been going on. I took posts from https://www.ce-strategy.com/the-brief/ - the excellent industry newsletter from Clarke and Esposito, and I put them into Google's Notebook LM - https://not...
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February 25, 2025

Claude 3.7 is impressive, how do we start to think about what it can do? AKA this a mike-drop moment, our entire industry has shifted and we have not yet even noticed the wave moving beneath us.

I’m interested in whether LLMs can assist in peer review, and in particular some of the technical aspects of peer review around things like statistical review. So every now and again I throw the following paper at an LLM - Mortality rates among patients successfully treated for hepatitis C in the era of interferon-free antivirals: popu...
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February 23, 2025

How do you keep up with news in the STM landscape?

Pre covid, pre family, I used to go to a lot of events, in particular there was a thriving set up meet-ups in London. that's all quieted down now, as far as I can tell, so how do you keep up to date with what is going on? I'm mostly using https://netnewswire.com/ as a feed reader, and I pipe in a ton of newsletters and blogs, both arou...
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February 23, 2025

How fast have language models been improving?

Wikipedia has a list of language models that gives some information about release date, training size, parameter size, you can see that list here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large_language_models. I took that data and did some human curation on it giving a rough "capability" level to some of the models - . I then asked GPT ...
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February 15, 2025

2024 - micro review

Micro Review - 2024. • 1462km cycled in 2024, compared to 278km in 2023. • Turned 50. • Still climbing better than my 8 year old and my 12 year old, but their skiing is far better than my snowboarding. • Got three new teeth - implants, painful. • Ate freshly cooked artichoke hearts, a new culinary experience for me, I liked it! • Trips...
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February 9, 2025

Open WebUI

tags: #llms #ui #local-models #tool-review After following this post - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/27/open-webui/#atom-everything) from Simon Willison, I installed Open WebUI - https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui) using this command: uvx —python 3.11 open-webui serve (As an aside, uv has just totally taken away all of the p...
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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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