Miranda L. Barnes

NYT: A wise and deeply moving letter to the editor from a retired history teacher Liz Zucker.

“Ignorance is not bliss. It’s just ignorance.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/o...

"Maybe the intelligence we most need is the capacity to see beyond the hierarchies that determine which knowledge counts. Without that foundation, regardless of the hundreds of billions we pour into developing superintelligence, we’ll keep erasing knowledge systems that took generations to develop."

AI Is Hollowing Out Higher Education Olivia Guest & Iris van Rooij urge teachers and scholars to reject tools that commodify learning, deskill students, and promote illiteracy.

“While the AI industry claims its models can “think,” “reason,” and “learn,” their supposed achievements rest on marketing hype and stolen intellectual labor. In reality, AI erodes academic freedom, weakens critical reading, and subordinates the pursuit of knowledge to corporate interests.”

It a sort of speculative way, Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr?

Open Divide 2025/2026 — Speakers and Topics In 2018, Open Divide: Critical Studies on Open Access examined the transformation of scholarly communication, questioning dominant narratives and highlighting unresolved controversies. Now, seven year...

I'm giving a talk on November 26 at 5 pm CET as part of the Open Divide: Critical Studies on Open Access series. Registration and more info on the series here:

opendivide.hypotheses.org/open-divide-...

OpenAI faces 7 lawsuits claiming ChatGPT drove people to suicide, delusions OpenAI is facing seven lawsuits claiming ChatGPT drove people to suicide and harmful delusions even when they had no prior mental health issues.

OpenAI is facing seven lawsuits claiming ChatGPT drove people to suicide and harmful delusions even when they had no prior mental health issues.

bsky.app/profile/samu...

Rethinking Rigour: Conditions of Creativity & Criticality in the Academy - Durham University 4 December 2025 - 4 December 2025

📣 The Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research is pleased to present RETHINKING RIGOUR, a two-day symposium exploring creative-critical research in medical humanities.

📅 4-5 December 2025

Find out more about the event and book your free tickets 👇

Art as Knowledge – Why research needs a non-aligned revolution - Impact of Social Sciences Drawing on political theories of non-alignment, Annalena Oppel argues universities should take a more plural approach to art as research.

“These aren’t ‘soft’ alternatives to ‘hard’ research. They are different technologies of knowledge that can access realities other methods miss.”

Excellent piece on the need for plural & inclusive visions of knowledge creation.

Brill find, Jenni!

Linked Open Profiles - ORCID Global Participation Fund Final Report 2025 Our project, Linked Open Profiles, is a WordPress plugin designed to display ORCID profile data directly on websites. With ORCID Global Participation Fund (GPF) support, we moved the tool from a proto...

Our team developed an open-source WordPress plugin that lets you pull in items from your ORCID profile and display them on your site. Very cool!

Schopieray, S., & Eben, G. (2025). Linked Open Profiles - ORCID Global Participation Fund Final Report 2025 (p. 3). MSU Commons. doi.org/10.17613/ypc...

LinkedIn just made an update, and it is USING YOUR DATA.

As of Nov 3, your posts/comments/activity will be used to train AI automatically.

Rather than in, it’s opt-out.

If you do nothing, your stuff becomes free fuel for AI with no "undo"

Wanna opt out? Update your settings: lnkd.in/emughyJ8

Racist incidents against UK nurses surge by 55% Royal College of Nursing calls on government to stop using anti-migrant rhetoric, which it says emboldens racist behaviour

The number of reports by nurses of racist incidents at work has risen by 55% over three years - the Royal College of Nursing calls on govt to stop using anti migrant rhetoric that drives this, and for employers to prioritise tackling racism and work with unions www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

The is particularly true of current ukgov funded research on AI that starts from the premise “Yay! AI is Brilliant! Amazing! Woohooo!!!”

I'm so sorry. Thinking of you and your family. 💛

Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory An intensive international study was coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC

Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory

A logo that says "open for all: Knowledge Commons & the future of open access"

It's open access week!

We, at @kcommons.bsky.social, are running a webinar later this week, showcasing what we do and what we have! Do please come join us... msu.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

#oaweek25 #oaweek2025 #openaccessweek

YouTube video by White Horse Press Plants, Belonging, Memory

We've posted a recording of the excellent event 'Plants, Memory, Belonging', co-hosted recently by Oak Spring Garden Foundation and our journal 'Plant Perspectives'. Fascinating presentations and discussion! Check it out here: youtu.be/CssAzff55Q4?... @plantperspectives.bsky.social #planthumanities

Hello Bluesky 👋🟦

We’re CEU Press, an independent academic publisher championing democratic thought, academic freedom & a diverse set of voices.

We publish books and journals in the humanities & social sciences.

Follow to hear about our latest books, open access initiatives & calls for proposals!

A picture of me holding Geoffrey Bilder's festschrift in a print copy. I have a goofy smile.

Creating this festschrift reminded me of a basic truth: you can do something nice for someone whenever you want. Don't wait until people are dead to praise them. Don't hold out for someone else to do it. Nominate people for prizes. Write someone a note of appreciation. Today's the day.

We really enjoyed seeing some of the multimedia 'books' other OIPA members are creating.

If you're interested in publishing something with multimedia elements, come talk to us! While we're a small press, through our partnership with @michiganpublishing.bsky.social we can make it happen!

"Data for Generative AI Improvement Can LinkedIn and its affiliates use your personal data and content you create on LinkedIn to train generative AI models that create content? Use my data for training content creation AI models" The toggle is set to off

Act quickly; you have until November 3, 2025, to let Microsoft know that you don't want your LinkedIn data used for AI training.

You're opted in by default... Head to Account - Settings & Privacy > Data privacy > Data for Generative AI Improvement & toggle the switch off.

On December 4th I'll be in conversation with @hjoseph.bsky.social about my new book Publishing Beyond the Market. Part of the @authorsalliance.bsky.social and @archive.org book talk series.

Register here:

www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-...

This is a big issue in Medicine, but its also a big issue elsewhere. The shove all the Internet just into a box approach to training data just allows AI to exaggerate existing biases 😟

Oh hiii #OAWeek - we are still looking for a couple more presentations for this Green OA event 😁 You may know someone doing fantastic work related to Green OA which needs to be shared (open access is sharing and all) 💚

As a result, @kcommons.bsky.social is temporarily down. There's little our engineers can do here except wait for AWS to come back. We should also note that as our funding body grows and institutions support us, we plan to implement multi-region redundancy, which will militate against such a problem.

There's a major outage at Amazon Web Services resulting in a number of sites and services being down including HMRC, Signal, Canva, and Fortnite. A reminder that we shouldn't put all our infrastructural eggs in one basket no matter how big the basket is.

The AI Industry Is Traumatizing Desperate Contractors in the Developing World for Pennies AI is propped up by a global sweat shop operation, where exploited workers polish the software for wealthy corporations in the west.

“…for an AI chatbot to generate an autopsy report, contract workers have to sift through thousands of gruesome crime scene images, a gig known as ‘data labeling.’”

Altmetric is now tracking podcasts as a new attention source Podcasts in Altmetric: Discover real-world conversations shaping public understanding of research

Want to find out if your research has been mentioned in a podcast? You can now track that in Altmetric.

www.altmetric.com/altmetric-ne...

Call for composers and publishers to deposit digital scores Help us to collect digital scores from composers and independent publishers.

Do you compose or publish music in the UK? 'Call for composers and publishers to deposit digital scores' with the British Library and other legal deposit libraries? www.bl.uk/stories/blog...

Please share with any musicians you know!