This is where innovation happens, not among the gods on Mount Olympus but in small, tangible ways where people go about their lives and try to improve them a little bit at a time. We all work together, unknowingly, making things better, faster, cheaper.
A brief review of studies linking social media and article-level performance.
You can still be manipulated, even when you know you’re being manipulated.
What might the recent backlash to revelations about how Facebook was exploited mean for the scholarly ecosystem?
With so much broken by the Internet, we may be moving into a mode of fixing things. Are open citations part of the solution, or more of the problem?
A new book explores how biases and broken systems get built into technology products and platforms.
Information manipulation is not new, yet everything is different. How do governments, preprints, algorithms, and our own responsibilities intersect? Where does peer review come in now?
Franklin Foer’s new book is a bracing account of the current information economy, the monopolies and motivations at its heart, and the weakening of democratized knowledge.
A possible consequence of moves to more tightly regulate social media companies may be they start looking for new investments. And they already have some in scholarly publishing.
Open access (OA) publishing seeks to eliminate paywalls for users. It has largely succeeded, but new diversions and distractions built into the commercial Internet may create new barriers that will be harder to deal with.
Algorithms behave in ways even their creators can’t understand, yet they dominate how we share and see information. Do we need a “Three Laws for Algorithms”?
Science’s historical progress can’t be assumed. It has to be reclaimed, re-established. That’s more difficult in a fragmented information space geared for extremism.
Meta has been acquired by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The arrangement will speed up the pace of scientific research and have an impact on scientific publishing.
Information warfare is both tactical and strategic, with much of its success stemming from the weakened economics of the current information economy. Scholarly publishers have experienced this in many ways, from Google Scholar to predatory publishers to pre-print archives — all answers to the calls for “free information” and all revealing tactical and strategic vulnerabilities as accuracy and facts become luxury items in the information war.
The age of information abundance may have fundamental flaws — barriers to entry that create false equivalence; dissemination tools that conflate fake information with responsible sources; self-reinforcing loops of conspiracy and paranoia; and social fragmentation that makes societal disruption more likely. What can be done? Here are a few ideas.