A Review of Some Recent Posts
There's a lot of room for improvement, as these post remind us . . .
Some posts are better than others, and after 17 years of writing about this gradually disintegrating industry, I probably have a slightly different perspective on what qualifies as an interesting, worthwhile post.
Here are a few recent posts that I think serve as a reminder that we still have a lot of work to do:
- Not Sitting Out the Emergence of LLMs. Unlike the passivity, even enthusiasm, some showed when IP was being filched during the early days of the Internet, creatives and companies are much more alert as LLMs roll out.
- More Misleading Claims Made By OA Advocates. I got scolded for going after someone misusing a PhD to seem more hard-science than she is, but you’ll get no apologies for calling it out — or any of the other misleading claims OA advocates keep making.
- When Quantity Is All That Counts — or Is Counted. We’re feeding machines with mass quantities of content, but doing so is profoundly reductionist and dehumanizing.
- When It Becomes Normal to Be Lax, That’s a New Norm. Normalizing the abnormal so companies can make more by doing less seems to be a goal these days in scholarly publishing.
- Google Scholar Is a Source of Fake Citations. And they probably don’t have the will or means to correct it.
- The Atmosphere of Despair in Scholarly Publishing. Everyone smiles in public, but behind the scenes, they know a lot of it is going down the tubes.
- Friendship Means Giving Out Grants. Apparently, that’s what some NSF people think.
- Preprints Keep Making eLife Look Trashy. Fooled again and again, some are calling for the preprint “loophole” to be closed.
- Tail Wagging the Dog. That’s the story of the last 25 years in scholarly publishing, and the tail seems to be both shrinking and wagging harder than ever.
There’s plenty of room for improvement. That’s the good news.