Jess Butler

‘Silent decoupling’ under way as Elsevier talks near crunch point York and Swansea latest to decline publisher’s offer, with latter also walking away from Springer Nature deal

'The University of York and Swansea University have became the seventh and eighth universities to confirm they will not take up a three-year deal with the world’s biggest academic publisher'. Sheffield, Lancaster, Surrey, Kent, Essex and Sussex have already opted out.

I love Jane Gardam's Old Filth. And, it's just a novella, but Helen DeWitt's The English Understand Wool is perfect imo

"Ultimately, our results suggest that without policy mandated human oversight, the deployment of generative AI threatens to degrade the very healthcare data ecosystems it relies upon."

"Blinded physician evaluation confirms that this decoupling of confidence and accuracy renders AI generated documentation clinically useless after just two generations."

"Crucially, this degradation is masked by false diagnostic confidence; models continue to issue reassuring reports while failing to detect life threatening pathology, with false reassurance rates tripling to 40%."

"we find that models progressively converge toward generic phenotypes regardless of the model architecture. Specifically, rare but critical findings...vanish from the synthetic content generated by AI models, while demographic representations skew heavily toward middle aged male phenotypes."

"In 2024, Professor Bishop did something that sent shockwaves through the academic world by resigning from the Royal Society over Elon Musk's continued inclusion as a fellow"

Some initial reactions to the 'published on a Sunday afternoon' letter from the CEO of UKRI. 🧵

www.ukri.org/news/open-le...

Smallpox: when was it eliminated in each country? World choropleth map showing, for each country, the decade when smallpox was eliminated. Legend categories shown are: Before 1900; 1900s; 1910s; 1920s; 1930s; 1940s; 1950s; 1960s; 1970s. Subheading notes that smallpox was declared globally eradicated in 1980. Key pattern: most countries in Europe, North America, and Australia eliminated smallpox earlier in the 20th century, while many countries in Africa, South Asia, and parts of South America eliminated it later, concentrated in the 1960s to 1970s. Data source: Fenner et al. (1988).

William Foege, the physician who saved many millions from smallpox—

William Foege, who sadly died this week, is one of the reasons why this map ends in the 1970s.

New article time! It's about self-defence against the fact that people seem to have lost their mind about LLMs and tech.

Call for entries 📣 The international €350K #EinsteinFoundationAward honors researchers and institutions across all scientific disciplines working to advance #research quality and integrity.
Deadline: April 30, 2026
Please share! 🌍
➡️ award.einsteinfoundation.de
#OpenScience #reproducibility

DHSC published its impact statement for the 10 Year Health Plan this week (yes, that is 6 months after it published the plan)

It's more measured and clear-eyed than the original document and quite a contrast to some of the effusive optimism in the plan

Some of the things that caught my eye 👇

I love this. Unis to stop paying a company millions of taxpayer £ to post their own academic research on a website

YouTube video by RoyalStatSoc Statistics in action: helping policymakers tackle the NHS waiting list

Recently at the Royal Statistical Society, I talked about hooking policymakers' attention with strong narrative

The research was part of a Health Foundation project on getting impact at the NHS

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD9V...

"Compensation to researchers will be contingent on receipt of a paper draft of at least 3,000 words during the month of August 2026. Payment can be made directly to individual researchers....The researcher will own all IP rights to their final research publication."

Palantir runs the tech for linking huge amounts of NHS data, and now for the UK Ministry of Defence too

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Disinformation Summer Institute (DSI) - Disinformation Summer Institute Disinformation Disinformation is false or misleading information created and spread to advance policy, political, economic or ideological goals. It is sometimes used by industries, governments, and ot...

Do you study disinformation or want to start working in that area?

Come to the DSI June 15-18th with @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @katestarbird.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, @rcalo.bsky.social, @naomioreskes.bsky.social, @emmaspiro.bsky.social, and many more.

disinfoinstitute.org

This team has measured, across the scientific record, corruption in publication

Now we can use this to shape policies for hiring, promotion, and funding

"The fees we spend on PISS could be funding hundreds to thousands of multi-year research grants. This problem sounds niche. It's really not."

Registration is open for this event 16-17 March @royalsociety.org with programme (titles and abstracts) available online: royalsociety.org/science-even.... In person and online.

This is the avant-garde preprint service (hosted on AT Protocol) that I've been dreaming of.

If it's a small fraction of its vision down the road, I'd still be happy.

Check out Chive (docs.chive.pub/getting-star...).

- scholar owned
- open/community peer review
- semantic linking to terms

New lecture series announcement 🧵

This term, on behalf of the DEC, I'm giving a 6-wk lecture series: "Beyond the Hype: Thinking Critically about AI in Healthcare"

Hybrid: 12-1pm EST in person at Yale, or 5-6pm GMT/6-7pm CET online
Registration: dec.yale.edu/programs/beyondthehypelectureseries

$30,000 for ambitious storytelling!

"The product of the fellowship should be a nonfiction reporting project in the form of a book, film, podcast, longform article, or multimedia project."

Symposium | Exploring Queerness in Natural History A one-day, interdisciplinary symposium centring LGBTQ+ inclusion in the environmental sector.

The programme is out for our Symposium, Exploring Queerness in Natural History, on 5 February.

We're excited to hear from our Symposium Curators, Connor Butler and @aquadan1.bsky.social, as well as talks from Simon Goldhill, @canopyrobin.com and @rossbrooks.co.uk. (1/3)

buff.ly/jc6Unz7

Yes! Teaching well is 100% political activism. (If you're doing this to people much senior to you, call it horizon scanning instead)

"Regardless of whether you leveraged AI assistance, show the human work: the problem framing, key design decisions & abstractions, and the practices that make the software usable & sustainable for others (tests, documentation, licensing, versioned releases, and a transparent issue & review process)"

The NHS takes FOI requests very seriously. When I joined, the training on getting answers to FOIs was rigorous.

FOI answers are routinely openly published:

www.gov.scot/publications...

www.nss.nhs.scot/publications...

Medical breakthroughs in 2025 ... and a happy new year.

New post!

There was a lot of innovation in medicine and biomedical research this year, and I've tried to summarize the biggest ones in this blogpost.

Medical breakthroughs in 2025. Plus a serious note at the end.
www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/medical-br...

A lovely, rich essay by Amia Srinivasan: on listening as political action

"I find it striking how few thinkers propose to bring psychoanalysis into politics as a technical craft (the ‘talking cure’) that might make us more effective political agents"

BBC Radio 4 - Sunday Worship, Advent Authors: Jane Austen The Ven Dr Rachel Mann reflects on Jane Austen to mark her 250th anniversary.

Oh it’s a smasher Rachel! The recognition of Christina’s genius is one of the canon-enlarging events of my academic career that I most welcome. She is such a special voice.
And I loved your #Advent Sunday Worship on JA!
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

14 two-year postdocs for academics of any nationality who cannot continue their research due to US politics. Do share if you know of such.