mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Pith y
The impending acquisition of Amsterdam University Press (@AmsterdamUPress@h-net.social) by Taylor and Francis is a stark reminder that almost everything within the commodified publishing industry is vulnerable to the insatiable appetite for growth inherent within the commercial imperative.
On my way to the Crossref event in Bangkok. The air quality may be declining rapidly and it may be a little too hot (even at 7am) for the average oversized North European like me, but I'm really looking forward to spending the day with the Thai librarians and @crossref@mastodon.online colleagues on behalf of @PublicKnowledgeProject@mastodon.social
RE: https://mastodon.social/@PublicKnowledgeProject/115980619055888490
Coming up later today. Looking at the OJS3.6 release that will include updates on JATS, open-peer review workflow, and the inline XML text editor tool – including a demo and update from SciFlow's own Frederik Eichler (@os_aps@openbiblio.social)
Madhura Amdekar from @crossref@mastodon.online launches the Crossref day in Bangkok, Thailand. A lot to get through today, with Amanda Bartell up next with the importance of quality metadata and how the information automatically flows throughout the scholcomms ecosystem. Already lots of questions and comments from the community.
The last OPERAS Conference in 2024 was excellent. I am therefore delighted that the organisers have forgotten how painful it is to host a conference and have decided to do another one, this time in Warsaw this May. The OPERAS Research Infrastructure is a place of real community, full of innovative ideas that is hard to rival or find anywhere else in European scholarly communication and I recommend this event wholeheartedly.
Dear {{FirstName}} {{LastName}} your value as a family member of this multinational knows no bounds. We thank you for your long service and contribution to our close community.
Forever yours,
%FirstName% / *|FNAME|*
RE: https://mastodon.social/@PublicKnowledgeProject/115980619055888490
Starting in 5 minutes.
A recording will be made available later this week if you can't make it to the webinar today.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@markhusk/116119273059384230
A free and open source academic editor able to export JATS XML and HTML has been a long time coming.
Today's update on the @PublicKnowledgeProject@mastodon.social roadmap includes the introduction of end-to-end production workflows within the journal environment for OJS3.6 🙌 [8amPST/4pm GMT/ 5pm CST]. Register at: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/pkps-development-news-webinar-february-2026-tickets-1975856243212
I received a job description for a role a recruiter would like me to consider. It's a senior leadership role (insert fake blush emoji for a self deprecating LinkedIn style humblebrag) and a main quality required is, "Must be comfortable using Excel and Powerpoint." Maybe for the first time ever, I feel qualified.
Remember the language of the recent Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. acquisition by Sage? “With this acquisition, we will honor and build upon Mary Ann Liebert’s legacy while growing the portfolio’s reach and impact”? Sadly, we hear that many of the Mary Ann Liebert staff have been 'let go' by Sage yesterday.
The #PKPOslo2025 Sprint has started here at Universitetsbiblioteket | University of Oslo Library. The working groups have been established and include metadata workflows for the indexing & dissemination of books, #CRAFT-OA Diamond OA plugins, the future of UI front-end tech stack, improving workflows, and multilingualism for citations, metadata translation, and machine translation. And that's just Day One. Busy times ahead for the @PublicKnowledgeProject@mastodon.social community.
The complete lack of understanding about what it means to establish research, data, and scientific sovereignty amongst senior members of the UK's research community and government is frankly shocking. The belief that they 'own' their knowledge and are protecting it from future AI and big tech threats. Not fulling understanding that they ceded that sovereignty to multinational publishers a long time ago and no longer 'own' that research or have free access to that information and data. It's scary
This piece by Ian Dunt is well worth your time this Saturday morning. A fascinating look at comics as an outsider's medium, designed by and produced by outsiders. Superman is such an outsider, but a different kind of outsider with the hidden heroism of the socially anxious, "Created by two Jewish nerds from Cleveland, they imagined a nebbish man – nervous, clumsy, overlooked – who was secretly a being of pure agency, able to do almost anything you could imagine." https://iandunt.substack.com/p/immigrant-superman-will-save-the-af1
The crawl before the fall… of referrals: understanding AI’s impact on content providers. This blog examines how the fundamental economics of publishing on the web are being disrupted as the LLMs extract data and consume content without attribution or redirection. An update to Cloudflare's Radar data introduces the crawl-to-referral ratio that shows AI bots consume content at an enormous scale without credit or attribution to the content origins. Post can be found at: https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-search-crawl-refer-ratio-on-radar/
Scholarly Publishing’s Hidden Diversity (@PLOS@mstdn.science) by Simon van Bellen, @lariviev@mastodon.social, and @juancommander@mastodon.social highlights a rise in global independent, open-access publishing, especially in the social sciences, humanities, and emerging regions. Signalling a shift in the power centre of the academic publishing industry and greater plurality in the global scholarly record. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0327015
With today's sad news about the demise of PubPub, it's time to roll out the overused open infrastructure image again. A reminder that funders, agencies, ministries, and institutions continue to fund the outputs and new projects that sit precariously atop software, projects, and community initiatives that go un(der)funded, but are trusted to sustain the increasing burdens placed upon them. Barend Mons recently wrote: "...the research funder expects the infrastructure to be (magically) available."
This is deeply sad news, especially for all the staff who have been immediately laid off. Please get in contact, and we'll do our best to share your stories and try to help get you placed. PubPub had so many exciting ideas, and yet... funding. It always comes down to funding.
https://www.knowledgefutures.org/updates/2025-06-update/
Interesting preprint, "shows that the oligopoly narrative...overlooks extensive local publishing ecosystems sustained by academic communities. As a result, the dominance of elite commercial companies appears far less pronounced in Latin American and certain European contexts than the global narrative suggests. The landscape of academic journals is beyond the oligopoly: it is diverse and often grounded in public, academic-driven initiatives rather than market imperatives" https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/cm5uz_v1