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
Herd Immunity & Herd Mentality Kids are vulnerable to MMR again due to vaccine misinformation, while a scientist challenges the herd mentality around "open"
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
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
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
The Radicalism Is the Point More bad ideas from cOAlition S, proving that they exist only to be more radical than the last time
Are Bulk Retractions Fair? Why can journals jettison hundreds of articles without being specific, or paying any real price?
Five Years On, One Big Theme There's been one big theme since this newsletter launched, and it would be wise to pay attention to it
Life With Larger and Larger Files Large files seem more problematic than ever when it comes to uploading, storing, and sharing them
The Corruption of OA Started with pristine idealism, OA has become more corrupt in some ways than we might want to acknowledge
Another Few for Tuesday eLife fires Eisen, journals without regrets (or refunds), and a forgotten "flagship"
Song: “Amarillo By Morning” Rodeos, FedEx, and space shuttles are just some of the connections around this great song.
DOAJ’s Financial Pickle Expenses have been rising faster than revenues, so everyone is going to pay more
Grumpy Old Tech “Optimism” Marc Andreesen releases a semi-coherent manifesto that reveals a mind that perhaps was never as wide-ranging as we'd assumed
More Eisen Drama for eLife Michael Eisen falls victim to his Twitter/X impulses, and ignites an unnecessary controversy