@timelfen
Principal of Forthcoming LLC, a publishing consultancy; Member of @limnpress.bsky.social editorial collective; Researcher & practitioner of scholarly publishing; Digital explorer–analog sailor; @timelfen@assemblag.es on Mastodon; Victim of meaning.
Now is really a crucial and also vital time for supporting open infrastructures. Many have been built in many contexts. I'm reflecting upon @rupertgatti.bsky.social's end notes to last week's @copim.bsky.social conference on the work undertaken there to infrastructure the OA books space.
🚨 SAVE THE DATE!
Copim’s Experimental Publishing Group is pleased to announce a two-day online conference on Experimental Publishing Practices
Join us next month to celebrate 3 fantastic experimental book pilot projects!
📆 8–9 April 2026
👉 buff.ly/5J80AJO
Important terms for World Book Day
Abibliophobia: fear of running out of reading matter
Tsundoku 🇯🇵: letting books pile up without reading them
Librocubicularist: a person who reads in bed
Déjá-lu: you’re reading something you have already read
Bibliobibuli: someone who reads alot/drunk on books
New from Yigang Qin and EunJeong Cheon for CHI "Labor, Capital, and Machine: Toward a Labor Process Theory for HCI."
Eve, Martin Paul, ‘The Archive at the End of the World: Speculative Preservation and the Politics of Loss’ (presented at the Textual Ecologies: Media, Materials, Environments, Passau, Germany, 2026) Eve, Martin Paul, and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, ‘Martin Paul Eve in Conversation with Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’ (presented at the SHARPIES 2026, Online, 2026) Eve, Martin Paul, Lucy Barnes, and Aileen Fyfe, ‘Open Access Books: Rights, Ownership and Control’ (presented at the London Open Science & Scholarship Festival 2026, London School of Economics, 2026) Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, Martin Paul Eve, Bonnie Russell, Scott Schopieray, and Ian Scott, ‘The Ethics of Open Scholarship’ (presented at the Ethics Week, Michigan State University, 2026)
I don't get out that much these days owing to terrible ill health/kidney failure, but I am still speaking on several occasions this year if you would like to hear my words.
Co-conspirators include @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social, @aileenfyfe.bsky.social, @kfitz.info, @alittleroad.bsky.social
[BLOG] Thoth Open Metadata and the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI)
Join @thoth-metadata.bsky.social on their deep dive into the results of a recently conducted self-assessment against v2.0 of #POSI
🔗
Author Emily Carter recently attended the #CopimConference as a bursary winner
The themes in her blog - collaboration, community values, connections - resonate strongly with us 🤝🧡
Imagining an AI getting sad as it learns that its accepted academic paper won’t be published until 2030
Ha! The original Lancet article on the dangers of reading in bed is here: doi.org/10.1016/S014...
"Scholars must analyze groups as they are embedded in relations of power to meaningfully evaluate the democratic consequences of polarization."
#SocialPsyc
In memoriam William E. Connolly 1938-2026 A career-spanning reading list, including “Symposium: William Connolly at 80” from Theory & Event in 2019 All articles free @ Project MUSE thru 31 March press.jhu.edu/newsroom/memoriam-william-e-connolly Illustrated with a photo of William E. Connolly from his JHU faculty page and cover art from Theory & Event and Social Research
Influential political theorist William E. Connolly passed last week, leaving behind an influential body of work studying democracy, capitalism & culture
To celebrate his legacy, we're unlocking his contributions to our journals thru 31 March on Project MUSE
press.jhu.edu/newsro...
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Very much appreciating your notes & remembrances Bonnie. They’re helping me remember my own engagement w/ Bill’s work, which always spilled over beyond whatever theoretical debate initiated my interest. My wife & I even instituted a policy of presumptive generosity in our marriage.
Bill Connolly died yesterday and he was one of the good ones. It kills me that he was taken while our politics are like this. He deserved to outlive the bastards. I guess we’ll have to take it from here. But let me say: for depth of understanding, empathy & moral clarity, this man had few rivals /1
We were very sorry to learn of the death of political theorist William E. Connolly this week. He published six books with us. Here is our appreciation.
💥New | A broader vision of open research is needed to include the arts, humanities and social sciences
✍️ @jenniad.bsky.social, @mirandab-oa.bsky.social, @samuelmoore.org & @stephenpinfield.bsky.social
#OpenResearch #SocialScience #Humanities #AcademicSky
I'm a cognitive scientist with an interest in epistemic vigilance, and this essay that's been going around gave me pause.
I don't think it's straightforward to apply the concept of epistemic vigilance to interactions with LLMs, as this essay does.
🧵/
sbgeoaiphd.github.io/rotating_the...
Peeps, there is a new full on Current Anthropology issue on Populism www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ca/0/0
Did you know we have a Bluesky starter pack where you can follow all of OJC's publisher members in just one click?
Take a look and give a click!
go.bsky.app/QvGSACZ
They’re also pedagogically useful: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concret...
"Since 2019, the government has been pursuing a plan to develop 400 world-class scientific journals as affordable alternatives to ones based in Western countries; by 2023 the country had about 178 English-language open-access journals, nearly half of which charged no APC..."
"Our public advocacy focuses first and foremost on collaboration with other infrastructures to establish an open ecosystem based on open (meta)data and interoperability facilitated through open APIs, with a goal to improve the position of OA books in the scholarly ecosystem through collaboration."
So I worry that this will be another science of science paper whose methodological individualism renders it incapable of registering the social worlds peer review sit within (& consequently help to erode those worlds by encouraging readers to act as if incentives are all that exist). Hope I’m wrong.
3. Directly related to 2, the recognition lots of journals are part & parcel of a particular organizational layer within scholarship that sets up different dynamics from other, less club-like journals. doi.org/10.1002/leap...
2. The recognition that peer review exists within overlapping moral economies of social obligation. Instead, I expect it will reduce economics down to individualistic incentives. doi.org/10.1177/0162...
1. Acknowledgement of the changing demographics of academia, where the constantly expanding amount of literature has detached itself from the number of available readers & reviewers. doi.org/10.1007/s121...
This looks like an interesting paper that I hope to have time to dig into. Going into it, & quickly looking through the reference list, this is what I worry will be absent:
A fitting tribute to a wonderful person and great scholar - Vince Rafael - from @dukepress.bsky.social
@kwissoker.bsky.social
As the reviewer crisis (the shortage of peer reviewers) worsens, this unfortunately favors corporate publishers who have created hierarchical journal families (e.g. Nature->Nature Comms->Nature Comms Psych) that they use as a funnel, which includes passing on peer reviews, saving the authors time.
If you’ve got something to contribute, don’t let that stop you! There are lots of people out here in the wide world publishing their scholarship. Knowledge productions is absolutely not contained solely in research institutions. Author affiliation is ultimately a lazy way of judging scholarship.
Also, the many times non-affiliated scholars make solid contributions to the scholarly literature. No need for them to be lone geniuses. Given that HE produces more scholars than there are HE positions for them to occupy, their contributions shouldn’t be arbitrarily shut out for lack of affiliation.