petersuber

I work for #OpenAccess to research. Formerly directed the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication. Now semi-retired but still working for the cause. Also an emeritus professor of #philosophy and non-practicing #lawyer.

Open research, metaresearch, higher ed, US politics.

True blue. Dad of daughters.

If you're looking for the Open Access Tracking Project (@oatp), I laid it down Sept 30, 2026.

Last Notes

2026-08-05 19:52:00 UTC

When #AI tools hallucinate citations, their made-up author names are not random. "We show that #LLMs do not merely default to high-probability individual names when generating fictional experts: they produce correlated character ensembles, pairs and trios [of co-authors] whose co-occurrence rates far exceed chance and are consistent across independent generations."
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02184
They fool people and tools:
"We identify 1,655 ghost-authored records claiming nonexistent journals with fabricated publication dates…Server-side #DataCite timestamps prove deliberate backdating…These carry real #DOIs…making them harvestable by any scholarly aggregator that ingests DOI metadata."
#Citations #Hallucinations #ScholComm

2026-05-18 13:57:52 UTC

If you do much #ScholComm research, beware that there's now a second #FAIR acronym. The first was Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability. The new one is Fairness, Accountability, Integrity, and Responsibility. It's about an "ethically-guided hybrid #peerreview system" that mixes human and #AI assessments.
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/jpm-2025-0285/html

2026-04-10 18:09:15 UTC

The #CDC is sitting on a report showing that the #COVID #vaccine "cut the likelihood of emergency department visits and hospitalizations for healthy adults last winter by about half."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/04/09/covid-vaccine-report-delayed/
(#paywalled)
It was set to be published last month when #JayBhattacharya delayed it because of "methodology" concerns. But it uses standard CDC methodology for evaluating vaccines, and Bhattacharya approved the release of a flu vaccine report using the same methodology the week before the planned release of the COVID report. Bhattacharya reports to #RFKJr.
#Censorship #DefendResearch #Medicine #Trump #TrumpVResearch #USPol #USPolitics

2025-04-07 14:10:02 UTC

Today the editorial board of _Mathematical Logic Quarterly_ (pub'd by #Wiley) resigned and launched a new #DiamondOA journal on the same topics.
https://open-access.network/services/news/artikel/ruecktritt-des-mlq-editorial-teams
See their open letter announcing their resignations and plans for the new journal.
https://zml.international/files/zml-open-letter.pdf
The new journal has a German title but will publish in English, _Zeitschrift für Mathematische Logik und Grundlagen der Mathematik_.
https://zml.international/
I track these journal "declarations of independence" in the #OpenAccessDirectory (#OAD), and just added an entry for this one, at the bottom in chronological order.
https://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Journal_declarations_of_independence#2025
#Logic #Mathematics

2024-11-18 20:39:16 UTC

The NYTimes thinks #SocialMedia is limited to Facebook, Instagram, Parler, Threads, Truth Social, and X/Twitter:
"Liberals Are Left Out in the Cold as Social Media Veers Right"
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/17/technology/election-right-wing-social-media.html
Most of the article is as one-sided as the title. But it concludes with this more judicious take from Phillip Walzak: "Nobody is building something for #Democratic causes which can actually do what the current infrastructure does for #Republican causes.”
#USPolitics