Joachim Schöpfel, Niels-Oliver Walkowski and I are excited to announce the Open Divide Lecture Series (2025–2026), a year-long exploration of the challenges, contradictions, and evolving landscape of Open Access and scholarly publishing.

Librarians have ceded our control of collections and collection-building in the digital realm to a few commercial vendors. Among other things, this has professional ethical implications. We must host our own digital resources or be subject to censorship and extortion.

The DataCite metadata schema provides many options for describing relations between research objects. This talk, from the Winter 2025 ESIP meeting, describes how the most common relationTyprs are used, opportunities for more detail in DataCite metadata, and measures of repository connectivity with bright-spots.

A copyedited, annotated transcript of my interview with Martin Eve.

Anyone reading this newsletter has surely used the frontier models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. I’ve written a few posts about using local models but haven’t really talked much about the tools I use to directly interact with these models. Those previous posts interact with local models using tools like ellmer in R or my own biorecap package which interacts with a locally running Ollama server.

I first saw the mirror fern in a valley that shouldn’t have existed. I had been leading a planetary survey team on Ross 249-b, an exoplanet flagged as a high-probability candidate for habitability but never explored beyond remote sensing.

Cathrin Bengesser (Aarhus University) in conversation with Francesco Casetti (Yale University) This interview accompanies the translation of “From Paleo- to Neo-Television: A Semio-Pragmatic Approach” by Francesco Casetti and Roger Odin, which was originally published in French in 1990.

My days working at Knowledge Commons are highly varied. It’s great.

We are pleased to announce that the projects OA Datenpraxis and Infra Wiss Blogs of the Information Management Research Group from the Berlin School of Library and Information Science at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin will be represented at this year’s BID Congress. Furthermore, Heinz Pampel will be involved in several other events during the BID Congress.

The Amazon region is crucial for climate balance and biodiversity preservation. DataMap/Amazon, an initiative of the Center for Sustainable Amazon Studies at the University of São Paulo (USP), promotes the production and dissemination of science for the sustainable development of the Amazon.

Invincible insects: cockroaches have evolved over 300 million years to become the ultimate survivors, with abilities that will shock and amaze you.