Mark Huskisson

A cartoon image of Superman silhouetted against a vibrant block red background.

This piece by Ian Dunt is well worth your time. A fascinating look at comics as an outsider's medium, designed by and produced by outsiders. Superman is such an outsider, but a different kind of outsider with the hidden heroism of the socially anxious.
iandunt.substack.com/p/immigrant-...

OJS, OMP, OPS logos

🚀 OJS, OMP, and OPS 3.3.0-21 and 3.4.0-9 released -- it's time to update!

Head over to the PKP Community Forum to learn more and join to get announcements like this one as soon as they are posted:

forum.pkp.sfu.ca/t/ojs-omp-an...

#OpenJournalSystems #OJS #OpenMonographPress #OpenPreprintSystems

It's such a good collection of items to go on a spending spree with other people's credit cards in South Miami. I mean, what is airport security like with first-class passengers carrying cheesecake in Louis Vuitton luggage? It's an image I play with from time to time.

TBH, I'm not sure how you even do that. What can you buy for that amount, and what are you going to do with it all? The Amex person ended up being quite chatty and told me they believe it was linked to the purchase of Louis Vuitton luggage and a number of 1st class tickets to the Dominican Republic.

With today's sad news about PubPub, is it time to roll out the much-overused infrastructure image? A reminder that funders, agencies, ministries, and institutions continue to fund outputs and new projects that sit precariously atop software, projects, and community initiatives that go un(der)funded.

Someone once spent nearly $3,000 in the Cheesecake Shop in South Miami. It was the strangest conversation I ever had with Amex. They kept asking me if I was sure I wasn't in Miami and finished with, "do you have any idea who this may be?" I paused and muttered, "someone who likes cheesecake? A lot."

A diagram displaying the crawl-to-refer ratio of leading search platforms. This displays the ratio of HTML page crawl requests to HTML page referrals by platform. Showing Anthroic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and DuckDuckGoGo amongst others.

Extractive and not reciprocal. Findings from Cloudflare's latest Radar data, "The crawl before the fall… of referrals: understanding AI’s impact on content providers", show that AI bots crawl sites as many as 70,000 times for every single referral click. blog.cloudflare.com/ai-search-cr...

Updates are coming to PKP software. This post outlines changes in OJS 3.5 & 3.6 that lower costs, increase accessibility, and support new publishing models. Updates also apply to OMP & OPS 👉 https://pkp.sfu.ca/2025/06/30/production-changes-plans/

Unfollowed. Receiving this same message over 20 times in my feed within a minute is just ugly and unnecessary. You should know better, do better, and be better in this space

In this session, Ian, you seemed to say that pursuing 'Open' was a problem for Britain and that we need to reassess our approach. I'm sure it isn't a binary position, but I thought you were saying Open equates to increased risk. And that we need to dial back on open. Does that mean more enclosure?

A header from the PLOS ONE journal displaying the title of the article: Scholarly publishing’s hidden diversity: How exclusive databases sustain the oligopoly of academic publishers by the authors Simon van Bellen, Juan Pablo Alperin, and Vincent Larivière.

This new study, Scholarly Publishing’s Hidden Diversity (published at @plosone.org), reveals that the academic publishing oligopoly is under pressure from the rise of independent, OA publishers, signalling a shift toward greater global plurality in the scholarly record. doi.org/10.1371/jour...

For once, those of us who missed out on tickets may just have dodged a bullet. By Wednesday and the @crossref.bsky.social Watch Party, things should have calmed down 🤞

A header from the PLOS ONE journal displaying the title of the article: Scholarly publishing’s hidden diversity: How exclusive databases sustain the oligopoly of academic publishers by the authors Simon van Bellen, Juan Pablo Alperin, and Vincent Larivière.

This new study, Scholarly Publishing’s Hidden Diversity (published at @plosone.org), reveals that the academic publishing oligopoly is under pressure from the rise of independent, OA publishers, signalling a shift toward greater global plurality in the scholarly record. doi.org/10.1371/jour...

With today's sad news about PubPub, is it time to roll out the much-overused infrastructure image? A reminder that funders, agencies, ministries, and institutions continue to fund outputs and new projects that sit precariously atop software, projects, and community initiatives that go un(der)funded.

News header from the Knowledge Futures website reading "Not Enough: Open Infrastructure Funding and the Future of Knowledge Futures: Dated June 23, 2025

This is deeply sad news, especially for all the staff who have been immediately laid off. Please get in contact, and we'll all do our best to share your stories and try to help get you placed in a new role. PubPub had many exciting ideas and still... funding.
www.knowledgefutures.org/updates/2025...

Some thoughts on Nature's new open review process

www.samuelmoore.org/2025/06/19/t...

This interesting new preprint on SocArXiv shows that "The landscape of academic journals is beyond the oligopoly: it is diverse and often grounded in public, academic-driven initiatives rather than market imperatives." osf.io/preprints/so...

As MAL herself said to her team, "You have incredible new colleagues and partners at Sage, who are welcoming and recognize what we have built. I could not be more excited for the future and what it holds for each and every one of us!” The 'in plain sight' hidden consequences of market consolidation.

An image of the two company logos of Sage Publishing and Mary Ann Liebert Publishing merged to represent the new company merger.

Remember the language of the recent Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. acquisition by Sage? “With this acquisition, we will honor and build upon Mary Ann Liebert’s legacy while growing the portfolio’s reach and impact”? Sadly, we hear that many of the Mary Ann Liebert staff have been 'let go' by Sage yesterday.

It's typical of the nonthreatening and inclusive language that you will see in most acquisition letters: welcome, family, and integration. Not too dissimilar to the recent acquisition of Mary Ann Liebert by Sage, where, we now hear, many of the Mary Ann Liebert staff have now been let go from Sage.

The top of a letter on headed paper from the Taylor and Francis Group that reads "Dear Valued Author, Taylor & Francis is thrilled to announce the integration of Amsterdam University Press's book publishing assets into its portfolio. This marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter for all of us, and we're delighted to welcome you to the Taylor & Francis family."

The impending acquisition of Amsterdam UP (@amsterdamupress.bsky.social) by Tnf (@tandfresearch.bsky.social) is a stark reminder that almost everything within a commodified publishing industry is susceptible and vulnerable to the unquenchable demand for growth of the commercially imperative.

What Can We Learn From Open Access Journals in the Arab States? In the 22 Arab states, open access faces endemic challenges, while offering a powerful example of how the diamond model can be successful and sustainable. A project to map the region’s open access jou...

What Can We Learn From Open Access Journals in the Arab States? Emily Choynowski provides insight into the project to map the region’s open access journals, finds that open access faces endemic challenges, while offering a powerful example of how the diamond model can be successful and sustainable.

The DIAMAS Project (@diamas.bsky.social) Final Conference begins at the KBR (Royal Library of Belgium). I am really looking forward to the conversations in this space, packed with European leaders and the wider global #DiamondOA community. Allez!

Bright and airy entrance atrium of the library at the university of oslo. 30 metre high walls of glass with a staircase running up the centre of the space for three floors.

The #PKPOslo2025 Sprint has started at @uio.no. Groups have been established to work on metadata workflows for indexing books with @thoth-metadata.bsky.social, #CRAFT-OA plugins, workflow improvements, and multilingualism for citations, metadata translation, and machine translation. @pkp.sfu.ca

Bright and airy entrance atrium of the library at the university of oslo. 30 metre high walls of glass with a staircase running up the centre of the space for three floors.

The #PKPOslo2025 Sprint has started at @uio.no. Groups have been established to work on metadata workflows for indexing books with @thoth-metadata.bsky.social, #CRAFT-OA plugins, workflow improvements, and multilingualism for citations, metadata translation, and machine translation. @pkp.sfu.ca

PKP staff and community members at the PKP Oslo 2025 Sprint

The #pkpOslo2025 sprint has started!

Follow us and the hashtag to keep posted about the work of our community in the upcoming days.

PKP’s Development News Webinar | June 2025 Join PKP's webinar to explore the development of our scholarly publishing software. This webinar is open to all our community members.

Please join us at our next Development News Update webinar, June 16 8 AM PDT!

Topics:

* OJS/OMP/OPS 3.5.0 release + features
* Expanded tools for content organization
* Customizable reviewer recommendation and more!

Hope to meet you there!

Registration: www.eventbrite.ca/e/pkps-devel...

My quote of the day

E' più facile resistere all'inizio che alla fine.

(It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.)

Leonardo Da Vinci

Simplistic image displaying the French words Décou Vrabilité. With two buttons at the bottom displaying the options accessibilité and bibliodiversité.

"Multilingualism and discoverability of scientific content: the challenge of machine translation" assesses the promise of machine translation and how it could contribute to improving the discoverability of science in French. The tools struggle with nuance and complexity.
www.acfas.ca/publications...

A real reminder of why it is so important to gather in person, in a room, where conversation and connectedness can thrive.