The Humanities as Canary: Understanding this Crisis Now
The Humanities have always been the canary in the coal mine of the full knowledge industry. What information can help us understand this crisis and its implications?
Are We Fumbling in the Dark or Laying a Strong Foundation for AI Education?
Adapting to AI requires a commitment to fostering AI literacy and creating spaces to openly discuss its challenges and implications.
Guest Post — Supporting Academic Librarians in Navigating Attacks on Intellectual Freedom
A recently announced partnership with Emerald Publishing will bring the EveryLibrary Institute’s expertise to the academic library community as the U.S. government attacks extend to institutions of higher education.
Guest Post — Classification as Colonization: The Hidden Politics of Library Catalogs
The renaming of “Mount Denali” and “Gulf of Mexico” to the politically loaded “Mount McKinley” and “Gulf of America” reveal the naked truth of what cataloging has always been: a battlefield where meaning is contested and conquered.
Guest Post — Scholarship in the Face of Powerful Opposition: Academia Needs a March of the Ents
Like Tolkien’s “Ents” marched against deforestation, scholars, scientists, and their supporters must awaken to the widespread risks of these authoritarian trends and unite their efforts in resistance.
Guest Post – The Future Is Not Perpetual (But it could be yours for just several thousand dollars per year…)
Clarivate recently announced that it is shifting to a “subscription-based access strategy,” meaning that it will no longer allow academic libraries to purchase perpetual licenses to content.
DEI Under Threat: The Battle for Inclusive Research
With Executive Orders banning mentions of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), what happens to research when these principles are erased? This post explores the risks of a ‘post-DEI’ society—lost data, eroded trust, and weakened scientific progress—and why inclusive research remains critical.
Copyright’s Big Win in the First Decided US Artificial Intelligence Case
The first AI training case has been decided in the US in favor of the copyright holder.
Indirect Costs (Facilities and Administration Cost) Explainer
The US government is looking to drastically reduce the amount paid in “indirect costs” in federal grants. Just what are “indirect costs”?
AI Rights Reservation: Human Readable is Machine Readable — An Interview with Haralambos (“Babis”) Marmanis
“Rights reservation language, whether in plain English, included in terms, or coded into, e.g., metadata, is “machine readable.” It is a choice by an AI developer to not read “human readable” rights reservation language.”
Defending the “Walled Garden”: Yes, Academic Libraries Actually Should Focus on the Needs of Their Host Institutions
Academic libraries’ first and most fundamental obligation is to support the work of their host institutions. This doesn’t preclude global engagement, but may put constraints upon it.
DEIA and Doing the Right Thing
Now is a time when we must continue to stand against censorship and to support the scholarly community in both our words and our actions, according to our ethics and beliefs.
NIH Cuts ICR – Implications for Research Institutions and Scholarly Publishing
What are the implications of last Friday’s NIH ICR budget cut? @lisalibrarian offers an early analysis.
Telling the Story of How Open Access Benefits Society: A Vision for the Future
Traditional metrics do not allow us to fully express how OA publishing benefits society; here’s a vision for the future of storytelling with usage data in scholarly communications.
Revisiting: Measuring Societal Impact or, Meet the New Metric, Same as the Old Metric
Bringing back a post from 2018, as funders increasingly demand measurements of “real world” impact from researchers. Does this steer us toward the same traps we’re already in from the ways we already do research assessment and is this short-term thinking problematic for the future of science?