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Matt Hodgkinson
@mattjhodgkinson@scicomm.xyz
mastodon 4.7.3Head of Editorial at DOAJ (@DOAJ@masto.ai); Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE; #C0PE) member; runner 🏃. All opinions my own. Previously: #OpenAccess journals at Hindawi, PLOS, BMC; #ResearchIntegrity Manager at UKRIO; COPE council; European Association of Science Editors (EASE) Treasurer. 💍 to @SimoneChalkley@zirk.us. Owned by a cat. 🐈 #PublicationEthics #CambridgeUK #SciComm #Running
1989 Followers
2781 Following
20 Posts
Joined October 31, 2022
Awful censorship of a school library in Greater Manchester. Not only are they misguidedly "protecting" teens from Twilight and the Da Vinci Code (alongside many more serious books), they're hounding their librarian with a disciplinary investigation.
There's a silver-lining to falling for corporate bullshit. You may not be the sharpest tool in the shed or any good at your job, but at least you'll worship your boss and enjoy your work.
"Workers who were more susceptible to corporate BS rated their supervisors as more charismatic and “visionary,” but also displayed lower scores on a portion of the study that tested analytic thinking, cognitive reflection and fluid intelligence. Those more receptive to corporate BS also scored significantly worse on a test of effective workplace decision-making. The study found that being more receptive to corporate bullshit was also positively linked to job satisfaction and feeling inspired by company mission statements. Moreover, those who were more likely to fall for corporate BS were also more likely to spread it."
Big move by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to stop paying Article Processing Charges (APCs) to make journal articles open access (OA) at the start of next year. Instead, they will mandate preprints & encourage preprint reviews. APCs made the transition to OA possible, but the tide is turning against this business model.
https://gatesfoundationoa.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/24810787662100-Policy-Refresh-2025-Overview
HT @johannes_lehmann@fediscience.org
#OpenAccess #GatesFoundation #ResearchFunding #APCs #PrePrints #JournalPublication #AcademicPublishing #ScholComm #OpenScience
Replying to
@abelbitez@mastodon.social I'm afraid that I don't trust that these are your thoughts, because the phrasing and framing is so characteristic of LLM output. Spelling and grammar fixes are more akin to when people use AI to help with flow and structure, but your use goes beyond that to outsourcing the analysis. It's inauthentic. It saddens me that you feel the need to resort to this instead of developing your own voice.
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@thewritertype@mastodonapp.uk You have to violently shake yourself between periods of unawareness to get the best outcome.
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@brembs@mastodon.social That Nature story had a silver lining: most GenAI for Africa projects weren't funded, showing a rigorous process and avoiding foisting this tech on those communities. Their mistake was launching that specific grant fund in the first place.
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@misty@digipres.club Here's the cover with her beaming, presumably having won. https://www.funspotnh.com/-Articles/pc-bizarroworld.htm
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@villavelius@mastodon.online @mike@sauropods.win @brembs@mastodon.social @Luke_Drury@mastodon.dias.ie @johannes_lehmann@fediscience.org Jan, your chapter envisages exactly the scenario I described: universal preprints coexisting alongside peer-reviewed articles. That's been the status quo in physics since ArXiv. It'll be good to have universal preprints, but it won't get rid of big commercial publishers.
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@villavelius@mastodon.online @Luke_Drury@mastodon.dias.ie @johannes_lehmann@fediscience.org @brembs@mastodon.social If the aim to replace subscription journals isn't realised, refusing APCs entirely will set the clock back 20 years. Stevan Harnad's Subversive Proposal of 1994 envisaged self-archiving causing subscriptions to wither away, but without success. Beware the law of unintended consequences!
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@brembs@mastodon.social @mike@sauropods.win @villavelius@mastodon.online @Luke_Drury@mastodon.dias.ie @johannes_lehmann@fediscience.org There are numerous stumbling blocks to work out:
- How will publisher back catalogues be accessed?
- How will funders enact this reform in fields and regions which they don't fund so have no sway over?
- Will institutions and researchers acquiesce to funder diktats?
- Big publishers may react by withdrawing cooperation: disallowing prior preprinting and self-archiving, withdrawing from free access schemes. System inertia may favour them.
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@brembs@mastodon.social @mike@sauropods.win @villavelius@mastodon.online @Luke_Drury@mastodon.dias.ie @johannes_lehmann@fediscience.org Simplistic sweeping statements don't get effective change. The negative framing of calls for reform may be a problem - everyone can see you're against APCs and subscriptions, and pre-publication peer review, but you need to have a clearly-stated positive vision that takes institutions and researchers with you to a sustainable alternative. Gates have jumped the gun by not having that articulated.
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@brembs@mastodon.social @mike@sauropods.win @villavelius@mastodon.online @Luke_Drury@mastodon.dias.ie @johannes_lehmann@fediscience.org If funders all stop paying APCs, that'll mean (absent another revenue stream) most existing publishers will en masse revert to subscription journals - and transformational agreements with institutions will revert to big deals, because funders don't control library subscriptions. Unless, of course, you have a replacement ready that researchers will use. Are such replacements ready?
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@brembs@mastodon.social @villavelius@mastodon.online @Luke_Drury@mastodon.dias.ie @johannes_lehmann@fediscience.org It's really not a difficult concept, Björn. If funders mandate preprints and stop paying APCs but journals remain (despite people's best efforts to replace them), then the system will revert back to domination by closed access subscription journals.
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@villavelius@mastodon.online @brembs@mastodon.social @mike@sauropods.win @Luke_Drury@mastodon.dias.ie @johannes_lehmann@fediscience.org It's an analogy to Marxist wishful thinking that post-revolution the state will simply slowly vanish. You can look up the latter phrase; it's not my invention.
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@brembs@mastodon.social @villavelius@mastodon.online @Luke_Drury@mastodon.dias.ie @johannes_lehmann@fediscience.org Funders never paid for subscriptions. Institutions won't just stop paying subscriptions even with high uptake of preprints, or physics journals would have vanished long ago. Unless a genuine replacement is offered, the prestige-based closed access journal system will remain.
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@brembs@mastodon.social @mike@sauropods.win @villavelius@mastodon.online @Luke_Drury@mastodon.dias.ie @johannes_lehmann@fediscience.org And the state will wither away and we'll have fully automated luxury communism.
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@guarder@mastodon.social @repeattofade@tootr.co It's a crop from a CDC graphic: https://www.cdc.gov/lgbthealth/transgender.htm