Madhura Amdekar from
@crossref launches the Crossref day in Bangkok, Thailand. A lot to get through today, with Amanda Bartell up next with the importance of quality metadata and how the information automatically flows throughout the scholcomms ecosystem. Already lots of questions and comments from the community.
On my way to the Crossref event in Bangkok. The air quality may be declining rapidly and it may be a little too hot (even at 7am) for the average oversized North European like me, but I'm really looking forward to spending the day with the Thai librarians and
@crossref colleagues on behalf of
@PublicKnowledgeProjectThe last OPERAS Conference in 2024 was excellent. I am therefore delighted that the organisers have forgotten how painful it is to host a conference and have decided to do another one, this time in Warsaw this May. The OPERAS Research Infrastructure is a place of real community, full of innovative ideas that is hard to rival or find anywhere else in European scholarly communication and I recommend this event wholeheartedly.
This piece by Ian Dunt is well worth your time this Saturday morning. A fascinating look at comics as an outsider's medium, designed by and produced by outsiders. Superman is such an outsider, but a different kind of outsider with the hidden heroism of the socially anxious, "Created by two Jewish nerds from Cleveland, they imagined a nebbish man – nervous, clumsy, overlooked – who was secretly a being of pure agency, able to do almost anything you could imagine."
https://iandunt.substack.com/p/immigrant-superman-will-save-the-af1The crawl before the fall… of referrals: understanding AI’s impact on content providers. This blog examines how the fundamental economics of publishing on the web are being disrupted as the LLMs extract data and consume content without attribution or redirection. An update to Cloudflare's Radar data introduces the crawl-to-referral ratio that shows AI bots consume content at an enormous scale without credit or attribution to the content origins. Post can be found at:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-search-crawl-refer-ratio-on-radar/Scholarly Publishing’s Hidden Diversity (
@PLOS) by Simon van Bellen,
@lariviev, and
@juancommander highlights a rise in global independent, open-access publishing, especially in the social sciences, humanities, and emerging regions. Signalling a shift in the power centre of the academic publishing industry and greater plurality in the global scholarly record.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0327015With today's sad news about the demise of PubPub, it's time to roll out the overused open infrastructure image again. A reminder that funders, agencies, ministries, and institutions continue to fund the outputs and new projects that sit precariously atop software, projects, and community initiatives that go un(der)funded, but are trusted to sustain the increasing burdens placed upon them. Barend Mons recently wrote: "...the research funder expects the infrastructure to be (magically) available."
This is deeply sad news, especially for all the staff who have been immediately laid off. Please get in contact, and we'll do our best to share your stories and try to help get you placed. PubPub had so many exciting ideas, and yet... funding. It always comes down to funding.
https://www.knowledgefutures.org/updates/2025-06-update/Interesting preprint, "shows that the oligopoly narrative...overlooks extensive local publishing ecosystems sustained by academic communities. As a result, the dominance of elite commercial companies appears far less pronounced in Latin American and certain European contexts than the global narrative suggests. The landscape of academic journals is beyond the oligopoly: it is diverse and often grounded in public, academic-driven initiatives rather than market imperatives"
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/cm5uz_v1Remember the language of the recent Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. acquisition by Sage? “With this acquisition, we will honor and build upon Mary Ann Liebert’s legacy while growing the portfolio’s reach and impact”? Sadly, we hear that many of the Mary Ann Liebert staff have been 'let go' by Sage yesterday.
