Saturday linkpost

I don't talk a lot about my profession on here, but colleagues shared a pair of articles in quick succession, and, although unrelated, they are in a kind of conversation with one another.

I read the news about this group of academics suing Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, Sage, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer, and my immediate reaction was that it reminded me of the group of Reddit bros demanding a rewrite of the final season of Game of Thrones, or the Star Wars sequel trilogy, or possibly both (the two things have blurred into one group of entitled male fans in my mind), when all of transformative fandom's reaction was baffled amusement. Why can't you just write fanfic like normal people? was the response to this bizarre demand. Similarly, while it's nice that academics have finally woken up to the fact that (as academic librarians have been saying for at least twenty years) academic publishing is broken and relies on a) free labour of academics conducting and writing up the research, peer reviewing it, and serving on editorial boards and b) the fact that academia uses journal prestige as a proxy for quality when evaluating CVs for job applications and career progression rather than actually looking at the research, I don't think the solution is to try and make the biggest academic publishers in the world (whose profit margins are greater than those of Disney) act altruistically. I'm struggling to understand what these academics actually want (for Elsevier to pay them? good luck with that) and genuinely appalled that they think they have a chance at success here.

Far better would be to do what TU Delft is planning to do, namely, taking away all their funds for article processing charges (APCs=paying additonal thousands of dollars to journals which you're already paying six figure sums to subscribe to in order to make a single academic's article open access to the public), and redirecting those funds to instead cover university-facilitated open access publication. I.e., instead of academics providing the research, the written article, the peer review and editorial work for free to a journal who then charges that same university twice for a subscription and to make the article open access, the academics will do all this work ... and the university will use the money to host the open access publication on their own platform.

Of course for this to work, academics will have to commit, on a global scale, to evaluating each individual research publication on its merits, rather than looking at someone's CV, seeing that they have five articles published in Nature, and assuming they're a top researcher and hiring them. But we can dream.

I found this post by historian Timothy Snyder, 'talking freedom in Kyiv', to be extraordinary:

[T]he Zelens’kyi paradox: a free person can sometimes only do one thing. If we think of freedom as just our momentary impulses, then we can always try to run. But if we think of freedom as the state in which we can make our own moral choices and thereby create our own character, we might reach a point where, given who we have chosen to become, we have only one real choice. That was how Zelens’kyi described his decision to stay in Kyiv: as not really a decision, but as the only thing he could have done and still remained true to himself. It was not only about defending freedom, although of course it was, but about remaining a free person.

There was a tendency in the west, especially in the early days of the fullscale invasion, to idealise Zelenskyy, and view him as a politician without flaws, which, if you pay attention to independent Ukrainian journalists, is far from the truth. However, Snyder is right when he recognises that Zelenskyy's decision to remain in Kyiv when it was besieged in three directions and bombarded constantly with artillery and groups of assassins were trying to infiltrate the presidential residence and murder him was a pivotal moment in the war, and — if Ukraine prevails, that, and the incredible bravery of its military in those early days will be viewed as crucial turning points. (I remember thinking at the time — when 'my' prime ministers, though I had voted for neither, were Scott Morrison and Boris Johnson — that there was absolutely no chance that either one of them would have chosen to remain in the capital city cut off in three directions by hostile forces and that both would have taken the offer of evacuation in an American helicopter at the first opportunity.) I do not think many of us would have displayed that moral courage, and I will remember it forever.

This piece about generative AI really pinpoints something that I was struggling to articulate:

If AI could say something for you, maybe it wasn’t worth saying; maybe you could have spared the world of at least one more instance of math masquerading as language. If you let it write your silly love song, it demonstrates how little love you feel, how little you are willing to risk or spare. But there are no labor shortcuts for caring, in and of itself, no stretching a little bit of intentionality to provide focused attention across some ever increasing population. Care doesn’t scale; cruelty does. You can’t automate your way around the infinite obligation to the other.

And that's all the links I have for now.