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!
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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November 27, 2024

What tools do you use for research integrity?

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...
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November 27, 2024

Software companies as publishers?

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 ...
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November 17, 2024

I learnt two things today that I’m surprised I didn’t know before.

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...
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November 11, 2024

STM Digital Preservation Webinar

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...
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October 29, 2024

JOSS has a call for new editors

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...
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October 4, 2024

some interesting links - week 40

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...
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October 1, 2024

we should not privatise peer review

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...
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October 1, 2024

should we try to detect AI generated text?

This post by Adam Day makes the strong case that detecting AI generated text does not solve the fraudulent paper problem because AI text generators are now useful for genuine research. https://clearskiesadam.medium.com/detecting-genai-beside-the-point-01f6c3d8e05c I agree with Adam on this point, and I want to expand on two further ide...
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September 27, 2024

OpenAlex is putting together an advisory board.

OpenAlex - https://openalex.org/ is an amazing open replacement for the Microsoft Academic Graph, and an open alternative to Google Scholar. They have been going now for about five years and are now putting together an advisory board. You can see their call for members for this board here - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TVEsfqRLA...
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September 22, 2024

McKinsey technology review.

This is a good fast scroll. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/the-top-trends-in-tech The two things I found most interesting. 1. Two year demand for tech jobs slightly up, irrespective of recent mass layoffs in the US. 2. Investment in renewable energy dwarfs all other areas of future facing tech inves...
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September 21, 2024

visualising python dependency trees

I spent a short amount of time this morning looking at tools that can visualise dependency trees in a small python project. I'm hitting a small bug with circular imports in a tiny toy project that I am working on. The recommendation in this blog post worked for me - https://medium.com/illumination/visualize-dependencies-between-python-...
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September 8, 2024

Attention and technology - some questions.

I bought myself a kindle so that I can read books with less distraction, and broadly I believe that it’s working well. One of the books I am currently reading is the excellent Attention Span by Gloria Mark. Some notes on some really interesting ideas: • Anticipation of learning creates a reward mechanism, which browsing the web can tri...
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September 6, 2024

Reuse Dryad data and win up to $100k from the 2024 Dataworks! Prize

Health sciences researchers: Reuse Dryad data and win up to $100k from the 2024 Dataworks! Prize The DataWorks! Prize, sponsored by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recognizes the impactful role of data reuse on human health. Successful submissions must: ...
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August 19, 2024

fund for AI training

The UK government has a fund to support training around AI, you can read about it here - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/flexible-ai-upskilling-fund/ai-upskilling-fund-application-guide#who-can-apply. This is who can apply, and for how much: Business sizeHeadcountAnnual TurnoverBalance Sheet TotalMaximum grant funding availa...
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July 24, 2024

GenAI just over a year on - scoring my predictions

GenAI just over a year on I made some predictions in May of 2023 at the BMJ board offsite. Let's review where we are now compared to what I said just over a year ago. Distribution We said: LLMs could disrupt discovery services such as Google. Since then: Google have accelerated introducing LLMs into their own search results, this remai...
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July 24, 2024

some recent GenAI news worth catching up on

Some news worth catching up on: • Antropic launched Claude Sonnet 3.5 • Competes with Open AI’s GPT-4o on price and capability. • Important because it shows that OpenAI does not have a monopoly on high quality models. • Therefore we need to keep evaluating multiple models for our needs. • Copyright risk for use of LLMs for software has...
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June 3, 2024

I sat down to talk about how I think about GenAI in the context of BMJ

I think the video came out OK. I'm sure that my thinking is going to continue to evolve, but this is a fair snapshot circa mid 2024. https://bmj.wistia.com/medias/y4b9gfs9ae
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May 17, 2024

Interesting webinar next week on how to increase access to data

There is a compelling case that can be made that in many cases data is more important any research paper that is attached to the data, and certainly at governmental and state level, access to underlying data sets more important than written reports. For scholarly publishing, the role of data, and what should constitute a first-class ci...
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May 16, 2024

building product with LLMs - some advice from Will Larson

This blog post is outstanding - https://lethain.com/mental-model-for-how-to-use-llms-in-products/. I normally like to write a bit more when posting on this blog, but I can only highly recommend this read.
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May 14, 2024

We are in the business of attention.

What is it that publishers actually do? The job we do is to provide platforms to support the dissemination of verifiable claims about the world, but the business of what we do is about marshalling attention, from getting the attention of authors for them to submit their work, the attention of researchers to review that work, and the at...
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May 13, 2024

BMJ's response to the ICO commissioner's request about GenAI

The ICO in the UK recently asked for a request for comment on GenAI and data privacy. With my colleague Timothy Morgan - BMJ’s Data Protection Compliance Manager - we drafted a response from BMJ to this request. The below is our response. Do you agree with the analysis presented in **this document ? ** It’s a clearly written analysis, ...
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May 13, 2024

two view on future energy needs of LLMs

This interview in Vox paints a concerning picture about the future energy use of LLMs https://www.vox.com/climate/2024/3/28/24111721/ai-uses-a-lot-of-energy-experts-expect-it-to-double-in-just-a-few-years It points to this research: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084189/making-an-image-with-generative-ai-uses-as-much-ener...
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May 12, 2024

What are we walking on?

We walk lightly on this earth, and when you live in a city like London you are stepping through history every day. I was at the Young Victoria and Albert museum today (my first time there since the big revamp), and these shoes took me on somewhat of a journey. They were owned by Lupino Lane, a Hackney performer from famous performing f...
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May 12, 2024

data to paper, and some reflections on LLMs

In February I had the great pleasure to participate in a small workshop at EMBO in Heidelberg to discuss the role LLMs may play in the future of single cell biological science. It was Chatham house rules, and in the two days we covered an extensive set of themes. We should be having a paper coming out soon with a structured write up. O...
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May 6, 2024

Measuring the impact of google on research

A fascinating paper looking at how google’s sudden departure from china affected research output. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13662716.2023.2298293 “show that the scientific productivity declines by about 28% in volume and 30% in terms of citations. ” This is a massive effect and it tells us that: • Ease of access to r...
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May 5, 2024

What is it that we do, as publishers?

“For me, the gloomiest part of the Critical Review is the finding that author behaviour has fundamentally not changed. Ninety per cent of the UK’s hybrid outputs are published by the top ten publishers, with the report stating “UK authors continue to choose traditional publishers to disseminate their research”” https://wonkhe.com/blogs...
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March 28, 2024

There is an upcoming STM integrity hub town hall

The link for this event is https://us06web.zoom.us/j/9862079621? and it will be on the 19th of April at 2pm BST, Joris from STM sent over the following: Join us for the second STM Integrity Hub Town Hall meeting! In this session, you will learn about: • Progress update on screening tools (now in use by 20 publishers) • First-hand exper...
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March 28, 2024

BMJ launches new clinical evidence product

We are launching a new product into market - BMJ Clinical Evidence - https://clinicalintelligence.bmj.com/. The team have been working incredibly hard over the last while to look at creating a medically relevant knowledge graph that underpins much of the clinical evidence that we publish. Our belief is that by making this kind of infor...
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March 27, 2024

The ICO have consolation out about GenAI

You can read about it here, it is relatively short, coherent, and worth reading over: https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/what-we-do/our-work-on-artificial-intelligence/generative-ai-second-call-for-evidence/ It sets out some positions for consideration around separating purposes of training from purposes of application building. I think ...
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