PubTech Radar

AI & Me - a snapshot of how people in publishing are using AI right now.

Please fill out my AI usage survey if you work in publishing.
Which models are you using? How often? What's delivering value? Takes under 5 minutes. Contributors get early access to results before I share them more widely towards the end of the month: ai-and-me.innovationideas.co.uk

This is a strange book. Lots of interesting points, but I didn't get the conflation of LLM AI with all uses of AI. Lots of good uses of machine learning. AI is bad was overdone, and I think it weakened their arguments. If 50+% of US adults are using LLMs, it's hard to argue they aren't useful.

YouTube video by Victor Powell Crixet Voice Mode

Love this demo of Crixet (now Prism). For all the talk of robotic labs and AI accelerating science, the reality is Victor Powell, the developer, in his kitchen, minding the baby (the high-value work), while talking to an AI tool to handle the writing: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce-S...

@mrstew.bsky.social might know.

I think you're being a bit harsh on yourself! There's a world of difference between someone with genuine expertise sharing knowledge and the AI Grifter crowd.

I love these! I think I'm probably closest to The Tool Magpie - though hopefully the more discerning end of the spectrum :-)

🚨 New issue of PubTech Radar is out: lnkd.in/eaCsVfja

Anna Aslanyan | On the Picket Line On Monday morning, more than a hundred people formed a picket line outside one of the entrances to the British Library...

British Library staff asked for a decent pay. Instead they got ‘a few money-saving present ideas’, such as ‘consider not giving presents this holiday season’. They are on strike this week. I wrote about it for @lrb.co.uk. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

Photo of an AI-generated white board about the LLama 3 herd of models paper

From Pietro Schirano (@skirano) on X writing about Nano Banana Pro: "Here’s my favorite use case so far: take papers or really long articles and turn them into a detailed whiteboard photo."

How to video: x.com/skirano/stat...

😀

“everything produced by an AI is a hallucination…” is becoming a ritual disclaimer. Hopefully, people will drop this one soon.

Scholar Labs: An AI Powered Scholar Search Research questions are often detailed. Answering them can require looking at a topic from multiple angles. Today, we are introducing Scholar...

Google Scholar gets into "AI powered" space Assuming this can use all the full-text they have indexed this might be a game changer. The timing of this release maybe suggests Gemini 3 is being used? scholar.googleblog.com/2025/11/scho... . Apparently some hit a waitlist, I have access though (1)

2025 Report: Technology Needs of Small and Medium Journal Publishers Insights into smaller-sized publishers' technical priorities, from research integrity to AI adoption.

A new report from Scholastica and Maverick Publishing surveyed 83 small and medium journal publishers from 21 countries about their tech challenges: lp.scholasticahq.com/technology-n...

Some stats:
* Current AI adoption is limited. Only 8% of publishers are using AI tools extensively.

Big Ideas in Publishing: Jonathan Woahn on AI Licensing Infrastructure New interview: Jonathan Woahn on how his startup Cashmere gives publishers control over their content in AI systems. As Jonathan puts it, they provide tools to manage entitlement, security, access, re...

New interview in the newsletter: Jonathan Woahn on how his startup Cashmere gives publishers control over their content in AI systems. As Jonathan puts it, they provide tools to manage entitlement, security, access, reporting, and turn-key RAG infrastructure. open.substack.com/pub/pubtechr...

Amazed by the volume of last minute submissions... Still a little birdie tells me unofficially the form will be open for a few more days...

Although I do like Anthropic's AI Fluency course: anthropic.skilljar.com/ai-fluency-f...

💯!

YouTube video by All-In Podcast Elon Musk: 3 Years of X, OpenAI Lawsuit, Bill Gates, Grokipedia & The Future of Everything

I found Musk's discussion of how they’re building Grokipedia interesting in the latest All In podcast: youtu.be/j6_VfR-CyuM. Grok is teaching itself reasoning, then rewriting ~1M Wikipedia pages. The goal: a self-updating, “maximally truth-seeking” AI that fixes errors and filters bias.

Google Scholar tool gives extra credit to first and last authors Researchers welcome the initiative, but say it doesn’t go far enough to capture the nuance of researcher productivity and impact.

Yay, let’s swap bad metrics for more bad metrics! 🤩 And with a twist - as shown by a browser extension.

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

Got you. ‘Stochastic parrots’ in particular has become a mantra against engagement with AI & it’s frustrating/seems to blind people to tools that can be incredibly useful.

Join my second run of "AI powered search for libraries: A crash course on understanding fundamentals for library professionals". We have a Fully virtual option: $75 USD or a Hybrid option - first two sessions are online & the third will be face to face in Bangkok for the Charleston Asia Conf (1)

🙏🙏🙏 Huge thanks to BCS Women and BCS Publishing for hosting the event.

AI in Peer Review: Highlights from the AI Publishing Collective Meetup The recent AI Publishing Collective event at BCS London, hosted by BCSWomen, and BCS Publishing, brought together experts from across scholarly publishing to discuss how AI is shaping peer review and ...

Research output has increased 212% since 2004, but reviewer capacity hasn't kept pace. At the AI Publishing Collective meetup, Chris Leonard, Wiley's Sam Parker and Rebecca Windless, and Digital Science's Leslie McIntosh explored how AI might address this challenge.

www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-pee...

Fair point, but the original tweet did make it sound like GPT-5 had actually solved those problems, which it hadn’t. The constant AI boosterism is wearing thin. At this point, every “breakthrough” just makes me ask, what’s the catch this time?

Book Launch Event - Psychology of AI - London | BCS Publishing Join us in London next Tuesday, 28 October for the launch of The Psychology of AI Decision Making by Chris Ambler BSc (Hons) FBCS GMBPsS The event is being hosted by The British Psychological Societ...

Very interested in this and already have my ticket 🎟️. Looking forward to it 🧠🤖: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Books By People | Defending Organic Literature in an AI world Books by People's mission is to safeguard human creativity in modern literature by helping publishers and authors to certify their books as human-authored, with a process readers can trust.

📢 A British start-up, Books By People, is introducing an 'Organic Literature' certification to help readers identify books written by humans rather than machines. The first certified title, Telenovela by Gonzalo C Garcia, is due out next month, published by Galley Beggar Press.
🔗 booksbypeople.org

YouTube video by a16z Building an AI Physicist: ChatGPT Co-Creator’s Next Venture

Periodic Labs: A new $300 million seed-backed startup aiming to build “AI scientists” — autonomous systems that hypothesise, run physical experiments, gather data, learn, iterate — especially in the physical sciences. They’re starting with materials/superconductors.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FoW...

📅 How is AI reshaping peer review?
Join the AI Publishing Collective, hosted by BCS Women & BCS Publishing, for insights on efficiency, fairness, and research integrity. Speakers: Chris Leonard, Sam Parker, Leslie McIntosh. Mon, September 22, 6 - 8:30pm London
👉 www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1642733864...

Copywriting word cloud in an open tablet next to a pen and a cup of coffee.

Maverick’s copywriting services help scholarly publishers use the written word to reach their audience in a variety of ways. Learn more and see examples in our new blog post
“Get the Message Out with Maverick’s Copywriting Services” bit.ly/3UZ3NzC

Rendering of a woman standing in the middle of a dark maze with lights guiding the way for her.

A new post for Maverick’s Insider blog provides complete details of our Interim Placement services, including examples of how we’ve solved staffing challenges for numerous publishers.
Read “Solve Staffing Challenges with Interim Support” bit.ly/3JkuBb1