The Anti-Autocracy Handbook: A Scholars' Guide to Navigating Democratic Backsliding

The Anti-Autocracy Handbook is a call to action, resilience, and collective defence of democracy, truth, and academic freedom in the face of mounting authoritarianism. It tries to provide guidance to scholars navigating the growing global trend of democratic backsliding and autocratization, in particular in the U.S. To this end, it sets out how autocracies often follow a common playbook, built around the “3 Ps”: populism, polarization, and post-truth. Leaders present themselves as voices of “the people” against “corrupt elites”, inflame societal divisions, and undermine facts to avoid accountability. This leads to a cascade of dangers for scholarship, including censorship, restrictions on funding and research collaboration, and even violence. The Trump administration serves as a contemporary example, with policies that curtail international scientific cooperation, revoke research grants, and suppress studies related to public health, climate change and minority issues. Because open inquiry and dissent are central to science and academia—qualities antithetical to authoritarian control—academia is often among the first targets of autocrats. To help scholars resist authoritarian developments, the handbook highlights both historic and contemporary measures aimed at attacking scholars, their institutional environments, and their scholarship. The handbook also sets out a framework for action based on personal risk level—low, medium, high, or extreme. This is designed to help scholars think about their own risk and purposefully choose actions in line with it. The handbook considers tools for enhancing digital safety and highlights the importance of ongoing documentation, preserving imperilled data, and creating distributed archives as a defence against erasure. It also calls on scholars to tell their stories—publicly or anonymously—to inspire others, maintain accountability and preserve a historical record. Accompanying the handbook is a living wiki that will continue to incorporate new developments and provide updates on global efforts by scholars to push back against authoritarianism and safeguard the democratic foundations that enable free inquiry.

Open Internet Stack: The EU Commission’s vague plans for open source

An internal paper contains some hints about the EU’s open source policy in the coming years. An existing funding programme will continue under a new name and re-focus on commercial value. The document calls on the Commission to support open source in public administrations – and think about a new legal form. Many questions remain open.

Announcing Withdrawal of NSF Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems Proposal

In September 2024, The Carpentries submitted a proposal to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) Program. This project would position The Carpentries as a leading open source ecosystem and further solidify our independence as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organisation. Developing a proposal of this magnitude (1.5 million USD) involved a significant amount of preparation, from conceptualisation of the idea to navigating the complex submission process. It was the first time The Carpentries did it on our own, with our Associate Director, Erin Becker, leading as principal investigator.

Announcing Withdrawal of NSF Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems Proposal

In September 2024, The Carpentries submitted a proposal to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) Program. This project would position The Carpentries as a leading open source ecosystem and further solidify our independence as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organisation. Developing a proposal of this magnitude (1.5 million USD) involved a significant amount of preparation, from conceptualisation of the idea to navigating the complex submission process. It was the first time The Carpentries did it on our own, with our Associate Director, Erin Becker, leading as principal investigator.

OSF