tl;dr: Here’s a small addition to how you can also scramble images so that “AI” scrapers will end up with a poisoned data set Earlier this year, I’ve written about how I setup this static website to not only serve human-readable data, but also “poisoned data” to mess with the scrapers that are used to collect the training data sets for generative “AI”. As static website deployments via Codeberg Pages et al. aren’t offering a

The new administration in the US is attacking science. Accepted grants and publications are forced to be retracted or altered if they contain forbidden words. Funding and peer review processes for biomedical research are grinding to a halt, and (open) governmental data are being taken down to reflect the views of the current political administration.

+++ Radical Open Access +++ Creative-Commons-Lizenzen +++ Who owns free knowledge?

Türkiye, home to the largest refugee population in Europe, has been rapidly integrating emerging technologies into its migration control systems.

Justin Garson reviews Death, by Philippe Huneman

I've seen an uptick in people I respect concluding that the massive increase in badly-behaved web-scraping bot is intentional and just another example of sociopathic AI companies ripping-up long-respected web conventions for the sake of profit

tl;dr : cancel your big deals and transitional agreements (they’re not working) and invest in a set of hundreds of non-APC, OA titles offered by Open Journals Collective, which derives from the OLH model. Email Caroline Edwards (at Birkbeck or at OJC) to get involved. This week saw the launch of the Open Journals Collective. My good friend and colleague, Dr Caroline Edwards, wrote about this launch in the LSE Impact Blog.

I was recently at a conference – the friends-and-family kind. International, sure, but mostly populated by academically 'related' researchers. A chance to get all together, talk about new projects, showcase current research, see if there is a possibility for interesting collaborations. A nice sense of community, lighthearted and caring.  This conference also had a student track.

Seit Januar 2025 macht das Bildarchiv Foto Marburg rund 1,2 Millionen digitalisierter Fotografien aus dem eigenen Bestand verfügbar. Die Dateien sind kostenlos unter offener Lizenz beziehungsweise Public Domain Mark erhältlich. Darunter befinden sich unzählige Aufnahmen aus der europäischen Kunst und Architektur. Direktor Christian Bracht erläutert die Hintergründe der Open-Access-Initiative.

The first time I stepped into a biofoundry, I realized we were living through a moment that most people hadn’t yet noticed. It wasn’t a cleanroom full of microchips, it was a factory of living cells, designed and optimized to manufacture the future. Biotech had moved beyond the lab, beyond medicine, and into the very infrastructure of global power. This isn’t speculation. It’s happening.

It’s April Cools! Last year I wrote about parenting, in 2023 about friendship bracelets. and in 2022 about cocktails. This year it’s a bit of a meandering stroll through some ideas around mutual aid and self-reliance. Maternity wards If you walk around the maternity ward at Kaiser Permanente’s Sunnyside medical center outside of Portland, Oregon, you might notice the same two things I did.