Paid-members only When Scientists Run Journals A strange editorial reveals numerous strategic blunders as scientists prove status does not equate to pragmatism
Song: “You’ll Be In My Heart” Written as a lullaby, this song won an Oscar and supported a lovely, if forgotten, Disney hit.
Paid-members only Pondering Poynder’s Pronouncements A journalist sympathetic to the OA movement throws in the towel, and enumerates his reasons — but misses some big issues
Paid-members only Do LLMs Solve Any Problems? Do LLMs have any clear reason for existing? Is the danger in how they might keep us from developing our potential? And two updates.
Pay Us to Point Out Problems Should authors pointing out problems have to pay APCs? Who has a policy on this?
Paid-members only Is This Our First Reviewer Mill? Paying peer-reviewers would only add costs, invite corruption, and drive out the altruists
Friday Song: “The Chain” A Fleetwood Mac classic covered by Nuno Bettencourt's family at an annual musical gathering.
This Pencis Is Proving Annoying Another scammer pops up, and begins hammering academics with bogus prize offerings amid a set of related endeavors
Paid-members only How Vulnerable Is Wiley? An analyst tracking Wiley thinks their goose may be cooked, but their problems are just a symptom of a bigger mistake
Friday Song: “She Blinded Me With Science” A quirky 1980s hit was the work of a serious musician with a raft of interesting credits
More From the Insurrectionists Oligarchs continue to push for an overthrow of the scholarly governance system that restrains them
Paid-members only Herd Immunity & Herd Mentality Kids are vulnerable to MMR again due to vaccine misinformation, while a scientist challenges the herd mentality around "open"
Paid-members only Who Will Investigate AI Hoaxes? A new LLM tool to generate data allows researchers to fake studies, and we're not anywhere near ready for it
Overwhelmed and Misinformed Young people are searching for trusted intermediaries, while we keep pumping nonsense into their lives
Paid-members only Frontiers, ChatGPT, and Tufte Frontiers continues to show how shoddy their work is with useless ChatGPT summaries and bad stats presentations
“Are You on TikTok Much?” TikTok is leading to a dramatic difference in how young people see the world — but only where China wants to sow division
Paid-members only Funders Are Out of Control The root cause of most of the new crises for scientific publishing? Funders
Two Thursday Observations The woes of eLife continue, as do the woes of people struggling to deal with a diminished professional life
Paid-members only The Radicalism Is the Point More bad ideas from cOAlition S, proving that they exist only to be more radical than the last time
Paid-members only Are Bulk Retractions Fair? Why can journals jettison hundreds of articles without being specific, or paying any real price?
