Birgit Schmidt

Hello @springernature.com - you’ve just published another bit of nonsense in Scientific Reports 🙁

Uofm sub Reddit post about a professor using AI to grade a paper "I spent upwards of 40 hours writing a paper for a course, and my professor gave me pages and pages of AI-generated feedback, complete with section headings, bold text, and language addressing her as the grader (she tried to edit some of this out). I have strong ethical oppositions to AI, and I do everything I can to avoid giving it my art or writing. It’s incredibly frustrating to find out that I just put 40 hours of stress and original effort into training ChatGPT on my writing style. Not to mention that I was marked down for things that a human grader never would have even noticed. I really want to bring this up with her in office hours, but I’m worried that I’m going to be penalized for it on future assignments. The AI gave me a good grade, so it’s probably safer for my GPA if I ignore it, but I’m just so angry. How can professors ask us not to use AI to write our papers if they just use AI to grade them? I understand that they don’t have a lot of time, but I’m not asking for detailed feedback. I just want my work to be graded by a human."

This sucks; what are we even doing?

The inner workings of a paper mill: deevybee.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-...

Researcher of the Future: Confidence in Research In this report, learn how researchers are adapting to rapid AI change, shifting funding landscapes, and new expectations for collaboration and impact.

According to an international survey conducted by Elsevier, 68 percent of scientists say that publication pressure has increased over the past two to three years. 3,200 researchers from 113 countries took part in the survey. www.elsevier.com/insights/con... @elsevierconnect.bsky.social

Still time to sign up for this webinar tomorrow hosted by @copim.bsky.social, @sparc-eu.bsky.social & @scossfunding.bsky.social

The 75-minute workshop will feature presentations from SCOSS, @thoth-metadata.bsky.social & our very own Graham Stone.

Find our more and register below 👇 #OAbooks

Reformation of science publishing: the Stockholm Declaration | Royal Society Open Science Science relies on integrity and trustworthiness. But scientists under career pressure are lured to purchase fake publications from ‘paper mills’ that use AI-generated data, text and image fabrication....

Newly released Stockholm Declaration recommends the following reforms to publishing:

1. Academia resumes control of publishing

2. Incentive systems to merit quality, not quantity

3. Independent fraud detection and prevention

4. Legislation and policies to protect science quality and integrity

📄 A reminder that we are seeking writers (£600) and reviewers (£210) to support the development of new guides on:
- AI in research software
- Green Computing
- EDI in research software

Application deadline: Friday 3 October 2025

Find out more at www.software.ac.uk/news/writers...

Cory Doctorow (not on Bluesky) published IMHO one of the most compelling pieces about AI being a bubble pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/e...

Between @python.org and @carpentries.carpentries.org, the open-source ecosystem is rejecting the administration's inquisition against DEI. If you can support them with a donation please do. I just did!

Does anyone know about others who have declined NIH or NSF grant funding over over these terms?

PhD training needs a reboot in an AI world As machines get better at data analysis and writing tasks, doctoral training must evolve to make the most of artificial-intelligence outputs.

"Crucially, students will need to develop sufficient expertise to identify when AI systems produce plausible but incorrect outputs — which poses a dilemma because this requires the very skills that AI is starting to replace."

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Lynda points out that even though a relatively small number of data sources have been shut down by the US Federal government, many more are affected through letting go of staff - death by a thousand cuts.

arXiv will no longer accept review articles and position papers unless they have been accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review.

This is due to being overwhelmed by a hundreds of AI generated papers a month.

Yet another open submission process killed by LLMs.

It's easy for some of you to just never use LLMs and just criticize people who do. I would like to be in that situation. But here I am, with my moderator volunteers, assessing hundreds of papers submitted to @socarxiv.bsky.social, trying to decide how to fairly judge whether to accept them. /1

Airtable | Everyone's app platform Airtable is a low-code platform for building collaborative apps. Customize your workflow, collaborate, and achieve ambitious outcomes. Get started for free.

DEPRESSING: This is a list of Federal Funding Cuts and Research Universities. The tracker documents the impacts of the cuts on the human infrastructure of the research enterprise airtable.com/appo02JOpIo2...

Sale of the Amsterdam University Press film, media and communication list to Taylor & Francis - NECSUS July 9, 2025

News from the Evil Empire of Academic Publishing: In June Taylor & Francis acquired the back catalogue of Amsterdam University Press' film and media series. As a consequence the majority of the series editors publicly resigned and decided to move their series to /

necsus-ejms.org/sale-of-the-...

Webinar poster for “Mainstreaming Diamond: Regional Perspectives, Shared Futures,” dated 24 October 2025.

Join us for #OAWeek!

Webinar: Mainstreaming Diamond – Regional Perspectives, Shared Futures

With @joedeville.bsky.social, @theblochian.bsky.social, @kirahopkins.bsky.social, @rupertgatti.bsky.social, @joannaball.bsky.social & @paulaclemente.bsky.social

🗓️ 24/10 - 1:00 pm BST

🔗 shorturl.at/eFIvX

I just saw someone use the abbreviation “AI;DR” and I’ll be laughing for a while.

The @doaj.bsky.social is consulting on whether to retire their Added/Withdrawn change logs. There is a short survey and feedback is very welcome:

blog.doaj.org/2025/07/14/l...

What could be more obvious than the fact that, whatever intelligence a computer can muster, however it may be acquired, it must always and necessarily be absolutely alien to any and all authentic human concerns? The very asking of the question, "What does a judge (or a psychiatrist) know that we cannot tell a computer?" is a monstrous obscenity. That it has to be put into print at all, even for the purpose of exposing its morbidity, is a sign of the madness of our times. Computers can make judicial decisions, computers can make psychiatric judgments. They can flip coins in much more sophisticated ways than can the most patient human being. The point is that they ought not be given such tasks. They may even be able to arrive at "correct" decisions in some cases-but always and necessarily on bases no human being should be willing to accept. There have been many debates on "Computers and Mind." What I conclude here is that the relevant issues are neither technological nor even mathematical; they are ethical. They cannot be settled by asking questions beginning with "can." The limits of the applicability of computers are ultimately statable only in terms of oughts. What emerges as the most elementary insight is that, since we do not now have any ways of making computers wise, we ought not now to give computers tasks that demand wisdom.

There’s an enormous amount of stuff in this book I’d like to highlight, but start with:

“What emerges as the most elementary insight is that, since we do not now have any ways of making computers wise, we ought not now to give computers tasks that demand wisdom.”

Hi authors! Please remember to file a claim!

One thing I don't get about this is wtf does AI "augmentation" mean? If students only use it to summarise texts rather than writing the final essay it's still not good. They're not reading, figuring out what's important & processing information themselves. That's an essential part of learning.

Tackling paper mills requires us to prevent future contamination and clean up the past – the case of the journal Bioengineered Taylor & Francis journal Bioengineered has been targeted by paper mills. Our goal is to identify problematic articles published in Bioengineered during the period 2010 to 2024. Dimensions was used ...

New paper:

Tackling paper mills requires us to prevent future contamination and clean up the past – the case of the journal Bioengineered

With @deadneanderthals.bsky.social, @smutclyde.bsky.social, @mortenoxe.bsky.social, @thatsregrettab1.bsky.social, and me

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

We are creating an academic journal and *you* can shape it!

Make comments and suggest changes to replicationresearch.org 's
- Constitution
- TOP guidelines
- article types
- and reviewer guidelines
until September 5 and be credited as a contributor: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Cardboard box on a rock in a garden that says free plums & propaganda. Inside the box are French plums and postcards by Marc Fischer that say Losers Attack Our Libraries, Fight for Librarians

Free plums and propaganda.

Weiterführende Informationen über die Arbeitsgruppe sind hier zu finden:

www.langzeitarchivierung.de/Webs/nestor/...

Documentary Explores Historic Struggles, Lasting Impact of Black Librarians in America “Are You a Librarian? The Untold Story of Librarians” connects the history of public libraries, civil rights and literacy to the current political attacks on the public library system.

Documentary Explores Historic Struggles, Lasting Impact of Black #Librarians in America (via @wttw.bsky.social) news.wttw.com/2025/07/23/d... #libraries #publiclibraries

RIP Tom Lehrer - timeless gems tomlehrersongs.com/albums/

A screenshot of the Positron interface, labeled with its components: "Activity bar," "Primary side bar," "Editor," "Secondary side bar," and "Panel." The text "A quick tour of Positron" is on the left.

Take a quick tour of Positron, Posit's next-generation data science IDE, built by the creators of RStudio.

Read the blog to learn more: posit.co/blog/a-quick...

Dear #academicsky and #skybrarians....
Here are my notes and thoughts (whether you wanted them or not) for pages 1-16:
1) The weasel words gave me a headache before I finished reading the Executive Summary. 1/x

Presentation slides for my talk yesterday at #SciPy2025

Barba, Lorena A. (2025). Embracing GenAI in Engineering Education: Lessons from the Trenches. figshare. Presentation. doi.org/10.6084/m9.f...