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  There's an event today in San Francisco to celebrate #AaronSwartz on what would have been his 40th birthday. https://luma.com/xv5vrxzk?tk=hUAY04 I was asked to give some remarks. But I couldn't make it to the physical event and there won't be a virtual version. So I wrote out my remarks for one of the organizers to read aloud for me. I was told to talk about Aaron, mention at least one concrete thing people could do to advance #OpenAccess, *and* stay within 30-60 seconds. But I we...

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  "US’s #RFKJr claims #Arabs ‘don’t produce science’: Why he’s very, very wrong." https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/27/uss-rfk-jr-claims-arabs-dont-produce-science-why-hes-very-very-wrong Thanks to the #AlJazeera staff for supplying the famous counterexamples RFKJr never heard of. That's one approach. Another is to ask why he would even utter a public opinion on this question. Part of the answer is that he was campaigning against #AbdulElSayed, the #ArabAmerican #Democratic n...

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  "The #EPA Is Quietly Killing its Web Archive." https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2026/10/epa-online-archive-deletion-zeldin-camp-lejeune-trump-clean-power/ "Tens of thousands of documents on contamination, clean power, and Trump’s climate deletions are now scheduled to disappear." #Censorship #Climate #DefendResearch #Environment #Preservation #Takedowns #Trump #TrumpVResearch #USPol #USPolitics

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  From WSJ: "Musk Ordered #Starlink Slowdown That Blindsided #Ukraine." https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraine-starlink-elon-musk-trump-dbc49193 (#paywalled) Now waiting for reporters to ask #Trump and #Hegseth whether they gave #Musk a surreptitious green light, and if not, why the US military pays for a "military-grade version of Starlink" (i.e. #Starshield) that a civilian can turn off at will, and what charges the US might bring against a civilian who did so. Three possible c...

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  Update. "Our results indicate that the ratio of female to male authors keeps increasing steadily across disciplines. The increases are field-neutral —in other words, they are not bigger, for example, in [STEM fields]…The increases are… decelerating in time, which could suggest that the equilibrium of female to male authors may be plateauing. Finally, although the within-field gender gap is decreasing, it actually widened between fields." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/089...

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  Bravo to #Montana for putting a measure on the ballot to undo the local effects of #CitizensUnited. "The initiative would bypass Citizens United by redefining corporations and their rights under state law…It would also block anonymous donations." https://www.npr.org/2026/10/13/nx-s1-5991925/montana-ballot-measure-could-undo-ruling-on-corporate-spending-in-state-politics The article notes that #Hawaii passed a similar ballot measure, which is now tied up in the courts. But that's...

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  "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

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  "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

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  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

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  #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&...

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  This is the last month of activity for the Open Access Tracking Project (#OATP, @oatp). 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...

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  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

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  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 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-ta...

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  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

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  Vladimir Moskovkin proposes an interesting "reform model for scholarly communication that combines elements of centralized access —based on adapting the Soviet VINITI experience to the digital environment— with decentralized Diamond Open Access platforms." PS: This is the first time I've seen anyone draw the Soviet #VINITI model into #OpenAccess / #ScholComm discussions. Here's some background on the model, if it's new to you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VINITI #Cen...

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  When #AI tools hallucinate citations, their made-up author names are not random. "We show that #LLMs do not merely default to high-probability individual names when generating fictional experts: they produce correlated character ensembles, pairs and trios [of co-authors] whose co-occurrence rates far exceed chance and are consistent across independent generations." https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02184 They fool people and tools: "We identify 1,655 ghost-authored records claiming no...

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  Even on X/Twitter, "users countering #misinformation are more established, more emotional, and have larger followings than accounts spreading false claims." https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2026/07/usc-researchers-discover-fake-news-spreaders-have-less-followers-than-users-pushing-back/ #SocialMedia, #Twitter

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  "Musk Plans to Spend at Least $100 Million to Help Republicans in the Midterms." https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/30/us/politics/elon-musk-midterms-republicans.html PS: Assume Musk's net worth is 1 trillion. $100 million is 0.01% of 1 trillion. The net worth of the average American is $1,063,700, and the net worth of the median American $192,900. (These numbers are from the Federal Reserve's 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances.) https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.ht...

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  The only surprise here is the apology. "State Dept. apologizing for Africa map that mislabeled every country." https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/07/30/state-dept-apologizing-africa-map-that-mislabeled-every-country/ #Africa #AI #Slop #Trump #USPol #USPolitics

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  "Trump administration texted college professors' personal phones to ask if they're Jewish." https://theintercept.com/2025/04/23/trump-eeoc-barnard-columbia-texts-jewish/ As all academics know, you can't ask this question in a job interview. https://www.eeoc.gov/pre-employment-inquiries-and-religious-affiliation-or-beliefs But I guess it's OK when it's not a job interview, when it's the govt asking, and the govt includes a high-ranking official who gives #Naz...

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  Major Swiss data-rescue and AI-training project: "Researchers have copied massive quantities of publicly available #climate and #environmental #data from #NASA onto a Swiss supercomputer to train #AI models—and for safekeeping amid U.S. #funding cuts…It had taken approximately a year to copy the roughly 6 billion files [roughly 100 petabytes]…Going forward, the researchers are also planning to copy large quantities of datasets from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (...

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  I've accused #DOGE of terminating #NEH grants (and other grants) by using dumb keyword searches to look for prohibited words. It turns out that DOGE used dumb #ChatGPT prompts instead. Like this one (quoting verbatim): “Does the following relate at all to D.E.I.? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’” https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/arts/humanities-endowment-doge-trump.html #Censorship #DefendResearch #DEI #Funding #Humanities #Takedowns #Trump #Trump...

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  I'm sorry to hear about the death of Roger Summit (at age 95), the brains behind #Dialog, the pioneering pre-web search engine and library of searchable academic databases. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/technology/roger-summit-dead.html PS: Dialog was not free and not even close. But my college got two years of free connect time in 1990-91 on the condition that we keep logs and help the company learn what teachers and students wanted. I published my log in the American Philosophical A...

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  A federal district court just ruled that training #AI tools on copyrighted texts is fair use. https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/20/anthropics-landmark-1-5b-copyright-settlement-is-approved/ #Anthropic is in the clear for training #Claude on millions of books without permission or payment. However, it's liable for obtaining many of those books illegally, and its settlement of those claims (about $3k/title) was approved by the court. So far this decision only applies in the Northern District...

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  New study: "We show…that research assessment is driven more by differences between evaluators than by difference in the evaluated research." https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.09783 #Academia #Assessment #PeerReview #ScholComm #Universities

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  Would you trust journalism, research, or data from the company that took this contract? "#ICE to Pay #ThomsonReuters $125 Million to Find ‘Voter Fraud’." https://www.404media.co/ice-to-pay-thomson-reuters-125-million-to-find-voter-fraud/ #USPol #USPolitics

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  #Wikipedia just dodged a bullet in the UK but is still in danger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2026-07-13/Special_report The bullet was the possibility of Category 1 classification under the UK Online Safety Act. It was spared that classification but remains on a "watch list" of platforms that "could become Category 1 at any point in the future." If Wikipedia is later classified as Category 1, then either (1) contributors could no longer be ps...

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  Update. "Satellite mirror plans could disrupt sleep and ecosystems worldwide, scientists say," https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/apr/05/satellite-mirror-plans-could-disrupt-sleep-and-ecosystems-worldwide-scientists-say "Presidents of four international scientific societies representing about 2,500 researchers from more than 30 countries are among those who have raised concerns in letters to the US Federal Communications Commission (#FCC)…Altering the light-dark cycle could...

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  The flagship journal of the American Diabetes Association (#ADA) just published an editorial criticizing the #Trump admin for attempting to "Dismantle and Destroy Biomedical Research in the United States." https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/49/6/901/164764/Misguided-Brushes-of-a-Pen-Continue-to-Dismantle At an ADA conference yesterday, some members tried to pass out copies of the editorial just before #NIH Director #JayBhattacharya was scheduled to speak. They were blocked by s...

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  Republican politicians are way ahead of Haitian migrants in killing dogs and cats. #Republicans = 7 (Kristi Noem, Kevin Roberts, Todd Kincannon, Mehmet Oz, Mike Bost, Greg Gianforte, Victor Marx) #HaitianMigrants = 0 EDIT. See the thread below. I add more examples as I find them. 🧵 #AnimalCruelty #USPol #USPolitics