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 ...

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. ...

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...

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...

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...

#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...

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...

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...

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...

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. ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Some colleagues have been looking at research integrity tools . There is a partial list that they have put together https://gist.github.com/IanMulvany/e2478eb8723aaa7c77e4c9b607b6bf75. (this is not a list of tools that we are using) STM Integrity: https://www.stm-assoc.org/stm-integrity-hub/ PySciDetect: https://gricad-gitlab.univ-gren...

Microsoft just announced a publishing imprint - https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/11/18/8080-books-an-imprint-of-microsoft-launches-offering-thought-leadership-titles-spanning-technology-business-and-society/, and https://unlocked.microsoft.com/8080-books/. Stripe has had an imprint for some time now - https://press.stripe.com/. I ...

1) Hawking radiation is not what I thought it was - https://www.threads.net/@spaceaccordingtoskylar/post/DCdGRiiv5Iq?xmt=AQGzOpg_N0-0T9fDfXrx93xVU-uMRZ4-_UCPelTJV5APTw - rather than being mass lost to particle antiparticle pairs, it’s to do vacuum states being distorted in curved spacetime, which makes them look lint why are creating a...

Last Thursday was International Digital Preservation Day, I hope you all were greeting each other with "Happy Digital Preservation Day" salutations! While I myself didn't quite get there, I did participate in a really fun and informative webinar on the topic hosted by our friends at STM. The video is up now - https://www.youtube.com/wa...

You can see the call here - https://blog.joss.theoj.org/2024/10/call-for-editors. Joss is the Journal of Open Source Software, and the infrastructure runs entirely within GitHub. It's a great lightweight model where the tools support the mission incredibly well. They have a nice overview of their costs here - https://blog.joss.theoj.or...

AI Regular previous readers of this blog will know that I have a deep interest in how AI is, or is not, impacting our industry. Here are some interesting external links / tools that I think are worth checking out:Here’s a more readable version of the list with improved formatting: • Aider: aider.chat A CLI tool that interacts with Open...

I deeply disagree with this opinion piece: Privatizing Peer Review. Back in 2008, I wrote about the relationship between publishing and the patent system, and my views have not changed since then: Patents and Peer Review. For me, the key difference between these two systems lies in how they approach the issue of scale. I don't see a sy...