One of the most interesting things about teaching is that the best questions come after I’ve finished my talk. Yesterday, during Day 2 of my three-hour crash course on AI search at FSCI 2025, a participant looked at our side-by-side demo of Scopus (not Scopus AI), SciSpace (in standard, non-deep search mode), and AI2 PaperFinder and asked (paraphrased): Thanks for reading Aaron Tay's Musings about Librarianship!

The Greeks loved oracles. The average temple of Apollo, who among others was in charge of soothsaying and predictery, was adorned to the gills with gifts from grateful worshippers whose inscrutable questions got equally inscrutable answers from Apollo’s oracles. None of these were more famous than the Pythia, the young ladies high as a kite on volcanic fumes at Apollo’s temple in Delphi.

On Monday, July 14th 2025, I hosted a mini-workshop on homomorphic encryption at Google’s Portland, Oregon office. Though Portland is a small city, it’s becoming a hub for homomorphic encryption. Intel and Google both have a presence here, as well as the hardware startup Niobium, and a few individuals from other companies who happen to be based here.

Clear Skies created the first index of research integrity: Oversight. We offer metrics describing research standards covering the entire research ecosystem. If you want to know more about metrics for your portfolio, get in touch. I sometimes get asked why I picked the name ‘Clear Skies’. I used to fly gliders. Gliders don’t have engines, so technically, they don’t actually “fly”, they just kind of fall out of the sky.

The experiment was the writing itself

Vom 24. bis 27. Juni 2025 fand die 113. BiblioCon im Bremer Messe und Congress Centrum statt. Unter den rund 4.000 Teilnehmenden waren auch wir vertreten: Das Open Research Office Berlin war bei mehreren Vorträgen und Workshops aktiv beteiligt.

Nihon, noted

Click here for the version in English En 2025, lanzamos los Premios Crossref a los Metadatos, con el objetivo de destacar el rol de nuestra comunidad en la gestión y el enriquecimiento del registro académico.

This week’s recap highlights Autocycler for long-read consensus assembly for bacterial genomes (future post on this one alone coming soon), Progen3 for broader generation and deeper functional understanding of proteins, the CarpeDeam de novo metagenome assembler for ancient datasets, and hifiasm ONT for efficient T2T assembly of Nanopore Simplex reads.

In center-right tech-adjacent circles, it’s common to reference René Girard. This is in part owing to the influence of Girard’s student Peter Thiel. Thiel is one of the undisputed titans of Silicon Valley—founder of PayPal, Palantir, and Founders Fund; early investor and board member at Facebook; creator of the Thiel Fellowship;