petersuber

"Russia has hit printing presses and publishing houses across Ukraine in a series of recent attacks, destroying 12 million books and damaging other icons of Ukrainian history and culture…More than 35 publishing facilities have been hit over recent weeks."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly5v8qmy64o

#Books #Russia #Ukraine

Someone used bogus #copyright complaints to remove news stories critical of #Florida #Republican Michael Carbonara from #Google search results. "Carbonara’s campaign has denied any involvement."
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/op-eds/4707237/dmca-takedown-abuse-political-censorship/

@bc_butler@scholar.social gets to the heart of it: "This isn’t a glitch; it’s a predictable feature of a broken system. Civil liberties advocates have warned for decades that the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown regime effectively hands bad actors a low-cost, automated censorship button."

#Censorship #Copyfraud #USPol #USPolitics

This is the last month of activity for the Open Access Tracking Project (#OATP, @oatp@fediscience.org). September 30, 2026, will be the last day of tagging and updates.

The Harvard instance of #TagTeam -- the #OpenSource tagging platform on which OATP ran -- will start winding down soon after. But the code will remain open for all who might want to upgrade it and host their own instances elsewhere.

My 2+ years of effort to keep OATP and TagTeam alive were ultimately unsuccessful.
https://bit.ly/TransferOATP

The OATP social-media posts on Mastodon, Bluesky, and X/Twitter will remain online.

On October 1, 2026, we'll save the OATP dataset in CSV format, put it in Harvard's digital preservation system, and put it in #Dataverse for access and use outside TagTeam. I'll import it into an open Google Sheet for spreadsheet-level querying.

I'll share the Dataverse and spreadsheet URLs as soon as they're ready. Stay tuned for those details.

OATP home
http://bit.ly/o-a-t-p

TagTeam home
http://bit.ly/tagteam-harvard

#OpenAccess #OpenData

New study: Worsening geopolitical ties worsen scientific collaborations about three times more than improving geopolitical ties improve scientific collaborations. "International research partnerships are easier to damage than to build."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S004873332600171X

Can someone at the U of Chicago tell us whether it gave college credit for working in #DOGE to ransack the government?

"DOGE Affiliate Asked for College Credits for Participating in Takeover."
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-affiliate-asked-for-college-credits-for-participating-in-takeover/

#Academia #USPol #USPolitics

From PEN America: "Harassment and intimidation of librarians are common pressure tactics, particularly when librarians resist censorship."
https://pen.org/report/out-of-circulation/

#BookBans #Censorship #Librarians #Libraries #USPol #USPolitics

#NIH director Jay Bhattacharya says, "What came before [at the NIH] was politicization, and what we’re doing now is depoliticization.”
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/science-research-policy/2026/08/31/nih-director-says-lot-critics-call-much-it
(#paywalled)

I care about this for two reasons.

1. It's a good example of a justification which would be valid if true, but which isn't true. (I'm writing about these in a work-in-progress.)

2. It's a preview of what #Democrats will say when they return to office. If we can bracket the complexity that the Dem statement will be true and false on different points and to different degrees than the Bhattacharya statement, we can see the reaction to Bhattacharya's statement as a preview of the reaction to the Dem version to come.

#USPol #USPolitics

"ECRs are, indeed, at the forefront of the technological adaptation in research, actively exploring the potential of AI and new communication channels [‘making publishing faster, fairer, and more open’]. However, their ability to be truly transformative was constrained by a traditional, quantitative evaluation/reputational system."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/leap.2099

#AI #Assessment #ECRs #Metrics #ScholComm

An anonymous Australian scholar chastised an Australian historian for publishing his award-winning book with an Australian publisher -- criticizing the author's "choice of publisher" and recommending that he "consider more prominent international academic presses".
https://theaha.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/FINAL-Report-18.06.2026.pdf
(See p. 25.)

This is a stark example of favoring prestige over quality when the two differ.

BTW, I argued in this 2008 article that researchers and their promotion and tenure committees both favor prestige over quality when the two differ. The professors do it mostly because their committees do it, not the other way around. I also point out some other invidious consequences of this preference.
http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:4322577

#Prestige #Quality #ScholComm

The #NSF is shifting significant amounts of money from research grants to tech investments.
https://www.science.org/content/article/exclusive-nsf-slashes-research-programs-support-new-tech-initiative-insiders-say
(#paywalled)

#DefendResearch #Funding #Trump #TrumpVResearch #USPol #USPolitics

Great news for great service:

The Data Rescue Project just won the 2026 "Documents to the People" Award from the #ALA, #GODORT, and #ProQuest.
https://www.datarescueproject.org/dttp-award/

#Censorship #Data #DataRescueProject #DRP #DefendResearch #Preservation #Takedowns #Trump #TrumpVResearch #USPol #USPolitics

"Inside the new political screening that’s stalling #NIH grants."
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01924-8

"Mandatory reviews by [political appointees] and checks for 235 disfavoured terms have left hundreds of vetted grant applications in administrative limbo."

Here's the Nature list of "disfavored terms" that trigger slow-walking and political scrutiny of grant applications.
https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-026-01924-8/52836226

Also see the similar list of "banned words" compiled last year by #PENAmerica (apparently last updated Dec 2025).
https://pen.org/banned-words-list/

#Censorship #DefendResearch #Funding #Takedowns #Trump #TrumpVResearch #USPol #USPolitics

#Republican protests about the #SCOTUS #citizenship ruling are eye-opening. From the NYTimes: "Kevin Roberts, the president of the #HeritageFoundation...[said that the decision] lessened the value of American citizenship."
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/06/30/us/birthright-citizenship-supreme-court

#USLaw #USPol #USPolitics

Now we know. The high-security cell phone hardware and software used by the Secret Service are clunky. For example, when a local cop photographed Thomas Crooks, the man who shot at Donald Trump in 2023, agents had to receive the photos on their personal phones because their agency phones couldn't receive photos.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5943032-secret-service-hacking-vulnerability/

This answers one version of a question I posed in 2021. When govt officials need tools with the features of Google Docs or Zoom, I imagine they have high-security tools to do the job. But are they Bond-level or clunky?
https://x.com/petersuber/status/1348283734072696834