A few months ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Thomas Krichel, about his role in setting up RePEc, the working paper repository for economics. During the interview, I learned about a publication alert system he created at the same time, …
Damian Pattinson’s interview for the ATG Podcast has just been released, and it reveals some fascinating details about his background, and about the eLife publishing model.
It turns out that Damian’s father was a bookseller, so publishing was in the family …
I recently interviewed John Willinsky, best-known for the Public Knowledge Project. What fascinated me was the link between his teaching of reading to young children and his subsequent work in scholarly communications for higher education. You may not immediately …
Steven Gump’s book How to Review Scholarly Books, published just a few weeks ago (June 2025), is a very timely work: it tells you how to write a scholarly review. As the author acknowledged when I interviewed him, this …
The Freie Universitat Berlin, which Sven Fund pointed out was actually created by the USA in 1948 as a response to Soviet influence on the existing University of Berlin [CC-BY-SA 3.0]
This event, for the first time in hybrid format, comprising …
When we advocate open science, do we think about what scientists do? Alongside the theorising, we could all benefit from listening to scientists, to find out how they started in research, and their actual practice.…
If it quacks like a duck, it is a duck [Photo by Christian Bowen on Unsplash]
AGI, or artificial general intelligence, has been the holy grail of AI for many years. Ever since genAI was introduced, there has been increased excitement, …
Halliwell’s Film Guide is a collection of film reviews, first published 1977, and reprinted many times over at least 25 years. I still have a copy of this guide, and I’m afraid to say I …
It’s undeniable that some conferences have a special atmosphere. The location of the Fiesole Retreat, this year in Fiesole itself, at the European University Institute just outside Florence, is undoubtedly special. Most of the conference took place at the European University …
During several years of creating, editing, publishing, and revising dictionaries and encyclopedias, I produced guidance for my team of editors on what constitutes the perfect reference article. Subsequently, as a user, I continue to consult reference resources as part of the …
