Eric Schares

This looks like a map of Germany to me, which means I apparently live in Saarbrücken, aka the Scholarly Communications & Open Access Advocates cluster.

This episode has been a nightmare for my city and state, but I hope people realize it’s also a profound defeat and political catastrophe for Trump and DHS, who are slinking away having accomplished nothing. Minneapolis simply wouldn’t bend to them and they lost

𝘕𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 abhors a vacuum

The Cost of Confusion: Dispelling Myths about the NIH Public Access Policy and Article Processing Charges Last July, the NIH issued an RFI on limiting direct spending on article processing charges (APCs). Over 900 public responses offered valuable perspectives but also exposed widespread misconceptions ab...

"By far the most common misconception appearing in the RFI responses is that NIH public access policy has essentially forced researchers into a "pay-to-play" system"

Christopher Steven Marcum and Corinna Turbes on some of the misconceptions about the NIH Public Access Policy.

@tklebel.bsky.social @vtraag.bsky.social was it this?

Every social theory undergirding Trumpism has been broken on the steel of Minnesotan resolve. The multiracial community in Minneapolis was supposed to shatter. It did not. It held until Bovino was forced out of the Twin Cities with his long coat between his legs. The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

Last week in Minnesota, I watched ordinary people risk their lives to protect their neighbors. In the process, they not only won a significant—though not final—victory against authoritarianism, they proved virtually every MAGA social theory wrong. (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

📣 Our introduction to structural causal models in science studies is now published:
doi.org/10.1162/QSS....

@tklebel.bsky.social and I tried to make our introduction as accessible as possible. We illustrate the theory by three case studies based on a simulated model of Open Science. 🧵(1/6)

Stacked bar graph showing journal title on the x, and color coded blue/red bar segments showing counts of articles for that journal from Dimensions (blue) and OpenAlex (red). Some bars all nearly all red

Could move from a binary "research vs. non-research" approach to a more probabilistic measure. The user would then choose the threshold to apply when including works.

At the end we identify journals with a focus on non-research publications. I've also found a number of these type of journals.

Presenting a classifier to improve the identification of research journal publications in OpenAlex - Scientometrics This paper introduces a document type classifier with the purpose to optimise the distinction between research and non-research journal publications in OpenAlex. Based on open metadata, the classifier...

Improving the #OpenAlex document type classification is needed. Meeting abstracts and book reviews are very often grouped under "article", skewing the counts. This new classifier from Nick Haupka is a good contribution toward fixing that problem.

In solidarity with today's ICE OUT OF MINNESOTA blackout, MinnMax is donating $1 to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota for every share of this Bluesky post for the next hour.

bsky.app/profile/sloa...

@cometadata.bsky.social has been demonstrating it's possible to do big things! Matched over ~400K preprints 1/ ~2 MILLION authors to RORs—now in an openly available dataset. Come learn what we've been up to, what's next, and how to get involved. Next community call next week. Details below.

Sloan Foundation grant supports research on economics of academic publishing - University Library

Through our Economics Program, the Sloan Foundation is supporting work by @eschares.bsky.social at Iowa State University to probe the economics of academic publishing models.

Read more: lib.iastate.edu/news/sloan-f...

Sources: Royals to move in fences at Kauffman The Royals are moving the majority of their outfield fence in by 10 feet, drastically changing the offensive environment at Kauffman Stadium, sources told ESPN.

Interesting project to adjust and lower the fences of the Royals' Kauffman Stadium next year. Trying to be more "neutral" to home run hitters. Data was four years of hits, factored in temperature, wind, elevation. Considered L/C/R fields separately.

www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/...

We've got ISSUES. Literally.

We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do?

arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563

A 🧵 1/n

From the FellingGoneWild community on Reddit: Riding them logs Explore this post and more from the FellingGoneWild community

www.reddit.com/r/FellingGon...

"It is often said that doctors are interfering monsters obsessed with disease and power, who will not be satisfied until they control every aspect of our lives (Journal of Social Science, pick a volume)."

"A call to (broken) arms"

"GCSS drafted the manuscript but JPP deleted all the best jokes." 😂

In Scientific Publishing, Who Should Foot the Bill? Publishers often charge authors to publish their publicly-funded research. Will a federal crackdown make a difference?

Happy to be quoted in this overview looking at the complex problem of who pays for scientific #publishing.

Appearing with @samuelmoore.org , @juancommander.scholcommlab.ca , @csmarcum.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy

by @peterandreysmith.com for @undark.org

undark.org/2026/01/07/a...

In Scientific Publishing, Who Should Foot the Bill? Publishers often charge authors to publish their publicly-funded research. Will a federal crackdown make a difference?

'And according to @eschares.bsky.social, data suggest that APCs bear almost no relation to publishing expenses. “So that tells me that APCs are not set on really what it costs to produce an article there,” he said. “It’s more prestige.”'

Undark piece on who should pay for scientific publishing.

Trump Can’t Cap Overhead Rate on NIH Grants to Research Universities, Appeals Court Rules The ruling is a victory for higher-education associations who challenged the proposed 15-percent cap, calling it illegal and claiming it would devastate the research enterprise.

Trump Can’t Cap Overhead Rate on NIH Grants to Research Universities, Appeals Court Rules www.chronicle.com/blogs/the-tr...

Turing Machine Game Turing Machine Problem generator

Really enjoying my new Turing Machine board game.

Game #A51U6HM
✅✅🔲❌🔲
🔲🔲❌✅✅

I beat the machine!
#TuringMachineGame

www.turingmachine.info

To bring in the New Year, here's a proposal for external regulation of academic publishing, through a voluntary system of journal certification to the ISO 9001 quality management standard. 🧪 #ResearchIntegrity (1/2) www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Home Depot logo photoshopped by me to say The Home Despot

Thoughtful essay about time, parenthood, and memory. I was talking about this part last week. I made a butter braid for breakfast and a lasagna for dinner one year for our small family Christmas, and now it’s immutable “tradition”.

If we just stretch the early setup we'd have a Man on the Inside Ted Danson-type thing, with prickly but lovable characters. Too bad.

I do plan to read everything else by this author now.

Most Frustrating

The Librarianist. About a librarian in Portland, of course I'm going to like this. First third is some of the best I've ever read, an absolute 10/10. Then it flashes back and gets worse. Then we do it again. Then we finally return to the present day but it's too little too late.

Honorable Mentions

The Warehouse - Black Mirror episode about living and working at a (thinly veiled) Amazon distribution center in the near future

Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir. Looking forward to this movie

Hamlet graphic novel - Again, the pictures help. I actually understood what was going on

The best books I read in 2025 are:

Fiction: The Last Murder at the End of the World. Basically, what if L O S T was good?

Nonfiction: Free Speech Handbook. Graphic novel relating pivotal court cases in US history to current events. Dense, but the pictures help.

Impact factor and h-index are themselves "a single metric for measuring complex phenomena," and thus should not be used.

Decreasing affiliation metadata coverage in OpenAlex – Scholarly Communication Analytics This blog post examines the decrease in affiliation metadata coverage in OpenAlex. An analysis of over 13 million articles published by major commercial publishers between 2018 and 2025 suggests that ...

There seems to be a decrease in the coverage of affiliation metadata in #OpenAlex, particularly with regard to journal articles published by Elsevier since 2024. Only around 6% of Elsevier articles published in 2025 have affiliation metadata.

subugoe.github.io/scholcomm_an...