PubTech Radar

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

...Martin Delahunty interview on AI in publishing, article on the future of PDFs by Hetzscholdt and ChatGPT-4o, Timo Hannay interview on Midnight at the Casablanca, and finally Hannah Shelley’s “Google Scholar Is Doomed”.

...Paradigm AI-powered spreadsheet, Academic Search on Bluesky by Aaron Tay, fake citations involving Liudmila Zavolokina, Wiley–Anthropic content deal video, em dash satire piece, Roald Dahl’s “The Great Automatic Grammatizator”, Rick Anderson on Subscribe-to-Open challenges...

...FT CMS auto-generated image descriptions, Science Advances study on AI-influenced biomedical language, membership inference vs dataset inference, WASP 2025 workshop on AI in scientific publishing, publication alert systems NEP and BIMs, responsive vs static digital publishing models...

... OSF Preprints submission suspension, Near Missives newsletter launch, KGX3 engine from Thomas Kuhn Foundation, posters.science launch, Copilot Mode in Edge with multi-tab RAG, AlphaXiv blog-style summaries for arXiv papers, Pangram GenAI detection in Oversight, Veracity tool from GroundedAI...

PubTech Radar Scan: Issue 37 Somewhat delayed ‘back to school’ edition. Usual mix of launches, news, AI, and longer reads, somewhat haphazardly collected and curated.

New issue of PubTech Radar Scan: pubtechradar.substack.com/p/pubtech-ra...

Covers: Wiley’s journal migration to Research Exchange, Trusted Reviews scraping incident, IOI 2025 report on open infrastructure, call for US adoption of DOIs and ORCIDs, Crossref systems moving to the cloud...

Has anyone launched a Diamond Open Access Journal that is open for humans, but charges fees for AI re-use rights?

My overwhelming initial thoughts are somewhat cynical - this model is the result of someone being asked to reduce costs dramatically. They've hobbled the search, and you only drop into more sophisticated models when deemed absolutely necessary... (ok, often this was a waste of compute, but still).

Some of my Custom GPTs 'helpers' are now problematic - notably, I can't ask questions within the chat, especially if I have tight formatting rules in place. I can't work out how to get the model to respond sensibly other than by cutting and pasting into a new chat.

I had gotten into the habit of using ChatGPT as a search engine - that's not working like it used to. I asked for info about model parameter sizes - response "Meta's LLaMA 4 and xAI's Grok 4 reaching up to 4 trillion parameters" [incorrect info] No mention of ChatGPT 5, even when pushed, no search.

For example, I asked for a common citation in a certain format, but it told me it couldn't access the internet. I said 'yes, you can' and it did what I wanted. I'm not seeing the enhanced writing capabilities yet - these seem to be triggered in certain situations.

Initial thoughts about ChatGPT 5. There is a certain 'shock of the new', it's a bit like getting a new colleague that you need to get to know - some of the shortcuts I used/lazy prompts no longer work. It's very fast - so fast I find myself doubting the responses. Overall experience so far is 👎.

Interestingly I asked for a APA format reference to a tweet mentioned in something I was writing. ChatGPT5 returned ‘since I don’t have access to the internet…’

My initial ChatGPT5 impression is that it’s not reaching out to external sources like 4 which makes it fast but less valuable for me.

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS––Got a #metadata story, case study, or insight to share? Flash talks and posters are part of our Annual Meeting and Board Election. Submit by 20 Sept. All languages welcome! https://bit.ly/Crossref2025-CFA

This is the first post in Big Ideas in Publishing, an occasional series exploring concepts that could reshape research communication.

Big Ideas in Publishing: Tim Vines on AI Subscriptions How creating AI-ready research content could unlock entirely new revenue streams

I caught up with Tim to discuss this concept, which emerged from his thinking about what happens when artificial intelligence becomes a primary consumer of research literature.

open.substack.com/pub/pubtechr...

Big Ideas in Publishing: Tim Vines on AI Subscriptions How creating AI-ready research content could unlock entirely new revenue streams

Tim Vines, founder of @dataseerai.bsky.social, has been thinking about the future of research publishing for some time. His latest idea, what if publishers created AI-optimized versions of research articles and sold them as premium subscriptions?

The AI powered Library Search That Refused to Search From Clarivate's Summon to Primo Research Assistant, content‑moderation layers meant mostly for chatbots are "quietly" blocking controversial topics from being searched

[Blogged] The AI powered Library Search That Refused to Search - From Clarivate's Summon to Primo Research Assistant, content‑moderation layers meant mostly for chatbots are "quietly" blocking controversial topics from being searched
aarontay.substack.com/p/the-ai-pow...

YouTube video by Cactus Communications Rethinking Science Communication: Beyond Technology Trends

Enjoyed this podcast from @nikeshgo.bsky.social, interviewing Kent Anderson and Joy Moore, co-authors of How the Internet Disrupted Science. Lots I don't agree with but interesting challenges - need to read the book when it comes out.

music.youtube.com/watch?v=MrF6...