Kyle Demes: When people want to know whether a piece of research is any good, they usually have two options: ask an expert, or count citations. Both have well-known problems. Expert review is slow, expensive, subjective, and does not scale to portfolios of thousands of papers. Citations take years to accumulate, reward the already well-cited, and say more about whether a paper was used than whether it said anything new.That second gap is the interesting one. Creative work, including scientific discovery, is generally understood to be both new and useful. Citations are a reasonable proxy for usefulness. We have had no widely trusted, scalable measure for new. Funders say they want novel research, and then evaluate it with tools that cannot see novelty.Earlier this year an international challenge set out to change that, and the winning approach now exists as a working prototype. We are considering adding a novelty score to OpenAlex. Before we write a spec or scope resources to implement it, we want to know whether you would use it, what for, and what would make you trust it.The challengeThe Metascience Novelty Indicators Challenge was launched in September 2025 by the UK Metascience Unit at UK Research and Innovation; designed by the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex and RAND Europe; and operated by Challenge Works. Teams were asked to build a tool that could assess the novelty of a research paper at the time of publication.To evaluate the entries, SPRU built a ground-truth dataset the hard way: a random sample of recent publications across all disciplines (drawn from OpenAlex), each rated for novelty by human experts in the relevant field who were provided with the full text. Challenge entrants never saw those ratings. Their indicators were scored on how closely they matched the experts’, and the evaluators were blinded to who had submitted what.The winner, announced just a few months ago in June 2026, was a team from Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany: Jan Göpfert, Samuel Kieling, Jann Weinand, Titan Hartono, and Patrick Kuckertz. Their approach came top on most evaluation criteria (in a “winner of winners approach”), and they received a £300,000 prize, provided by Coefficient Giving, to develop it further.Coverage: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01882-7 and https://www.science.org/content/article/how-novel-research-paper-competition-quantify-concept-crowns-winner.How the Jülich indicator worksMost existing novelty indicators work from metadata: unusual combinations of references, keywords, or journals. The Jülich indicator reads the paper instead.It uses a large language model to analyse the study and a selection of the works it cites, and from those, it reconstructs the state of knowledge at the time of publication, including the open questions in the field. It then asks what the focal study contributes anew: an original method, a surprising result, or a solution to a problem that was previously unsolved. It deliberately collects arguments for and against the paper’s novelty and weighs them. The output is a score from 0 to 100, an interval showing how confident the model is, and a written justification that a reader can check.Jülich press release: https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/news/archive/press-release/2026/ai-identifies-scientific-novelty-julich-team-wins-international-challengeThe team is clear that this is a support for human judgement rather than a replacement for it, and that a score which could be gamed, or which quietly disadvantaged some fields or languages, would be worse than no score at all. Those are our concerns too.Why OpenAlex is interested, and what it would takeOpenAlex already carries citation counts, topics, and a growing set of work-level signals (e.g., field-weighted citation impact). A novelty score that is transparent, reproducible, and available for every work, free, in the same place, would be a genuinely new thing for funders, institutions, journals, and researchers to work with. The UK Metascience Unit has told us that it would be of interest to a large proportion of the roughly 100 research teams it funds, as well as to UKRI’s own analysts. And we would rather that such a novelty indicator be built in the open than watch it appear behind a paywall.It is not a small undertaking, and the open questions are the reason for this post:How far back? Scoring every work in OpenAlex is very different from scoring everything published since, say, 2019.Which works? Journal articles only, or preprints, conference papers, book chapters, and dissertations as well? The indicator was validated so far only on journal articles. Maybe that’s enough (after all, FWCI only applies to a few work types), but maybe it’s worth the effort to evaluate the indicator in a broader set of work types first. One-off or continuous? A static file scored once is much cheaper than a live score that updates as new works arrive and as records change. A live production database like OpenAlex really wants the latter, but maybe the community only needs static scores, updated yearly.Open-weight or commercial models? Open-weight LLMs would make the scores reproducible over the long term and could run on public research computing. Jülich is testing whether they perform as well.Cost and compute. Running a language model over hundreds of millions of works is a significant compute bill, however it is done. That’s why answers to the questions above are especially important before we fully spec this out.Transparency versus gaming. Publishing the full method makes the score checkable and makes it easier to write to. Where should the line sit and is that an argument for static historic application vs. on-going scoring of the indicator against new works?Use in evaluation. A score built to describe a literature can be misused to judge individuals. What safeguards would you want before it existed at all?What we are askingThis is a vibe check with a light-touch questionnaire, not a full consultation. We want enough signal on demand and scope to write a spec and a resourcing case, and we will go deeper later if the response warrants it.Fill in the form. About six questions, five minutes, any language. It stays open until Friday 13 November 2026.https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScOlmbDN7AdJic8jHO1dnQWMhppFIrMK96J0s6TmcU1oME3ZQ/viewform?usp=publish-editorJoin the webinar. Wednesday 7 October 2026, 8:00 to 9:00am Pacific (11am Eastern, 4pm UK, 5pm Central Europe). Ben Steyn (UK Metascience Unit) on why the challenge was run, Jan Göpfert (Jülich) on how the indicator works, and Kyle Demes (OpenAlex) on what integrating it into OpenAlex would look like, followed by half an hour of questions. Sarah Otner (SPRU) will be on hand for questions about the evaluation. Recording and slides posted afterwards.https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_EetlA-l3QgK2FvQVxE0GLgPass it on. Funders, research offices, metascience groups, tool builders, and anyone who has ever wished that citations told them something they do not.What happens nextWe will share a synthesis of the responses with the UK Metascience Unit and the Jülich team in late November, and publish a summary here. If there is clear demand and a workable scope, the next step is a spec and a scoped first run. If there is not, we will say so and keep the door open.Thanks in advance for any input you share. If you have any other questions about this initiative, let me know at: kyle@openalex.org The post Should OpenAlex publish a novelty score? A vibe check appeared first on OpenAlex blog.

Ekkehard Henschke: This brief German‑language piece by Ekkehard Henschke announces and contextualizes his review of Michael Knoche’s 2026 monograph “Revolution im Leseland,” published by Wallstein. The book examines how academic libraries in the former GDR reshaped their structures, collections, and mandates after the fall of the Berlin Wall, tracing institutional, political, and cultural transformations. Henschke’s article appears in the journal “Bibliothek – Forschung und Praxis” and is available open access via De Gruyter. While the text offers no formal abstract, it signals a critical engagement with Knoche’s account of post‑socialist library reorganization and its broader implications.

Michael Seadle: This German-language article by Michael Seadle reviews the edited collection “Knowledge, Reading and Culture: Studies in Information Practice,” part of the series Current Topics in Library and Information Practice (De Gruyter, 2026). Seadle discusses the volume’s contributions to library and information science, especially how it addresses knowledge creation, reading as an information practice, and the cultural frameworks shaping both. He evaluates the range and quality of the included studies, considering their theoretical grounding, empirical methods, and relevance for practitioners. The review situates the book within ongoing debates on information behavior and the future of library services.

DIE ZEIT: Film - Sarah Kohler: Die Gründer von »South Park« benennen die Satireserie um. Künftig heißt sie »South America«, schrieben Trey Parker und Matt Stone, und kritisierten Google und Apple.

Rafael Behr: Far-right parties, Maga ideology and Kremlin money are conniving to suffocate liberal idealism for another generationNot all that long ago, Europe was a beacon of liberal idealism. One memoir recalls it as an era “comfortably saturated with confidence in the unfailing and binding power of tolerance and conciliation”. The economic system seemed obviously preferable to barbarous alternatives. “People honestly believed that the divergencies and the boundaries between nations and sects would gradually melt away into a common humanity,” the author added.Those words could describe the spirit of globalisation at the turn of the millennium. They were written in the 1930s by Stefan Zweig, reflecting on the optimism of late 19th-century Vienna from the perspective of a Jewish émigré whose world had been destroyed by murderous nationalism. Zweig took his own life in 1942. He never saw fascism defeated. He couldn’t have imagined a renaissance of liberalism in the second half of the 20th century so complete as to attain a pitch of complacency rivalling the one he remembered from his childhood. Continue reading...© Illustration: Anaïs Mims/Getty© Illustration: Anaïs Mims/Getty© Illustration: Anaïs Mims/Getty

DIE ZEIT: Deutschland - Theresa Walter: Ein Unbekannter schoss nach der Landtagswahl auf die Teilnehmer einer Anti-AfD-Demonstration in Halle. Ein Mensch wurde verletzt, der Staatsschutz ermittelt.

Explore, enrich, classify, and visualize institutional publications from OpenAlex and DSpace with Aurora SDG models, caching, charts, and CSV/XLSX export. - jmiba/Aurora-SDG-Publication-Classifier

Emma Loffhagen: The country risks ‘the collapse of the entire book ecosystem’ following destruction of warehouses in July and August, say Ukrainian publishersThe Ukrainian Book Institute has called on the international publishing community to support Ukrainian publishers after Russian attacks in July and early August destroyed about 10m books and a significant share of the country’s book production capacity.The institute said the attacks on publishing, printing and warehouse infrastructure had left some companies at risk of financial collapse. A major attack on 1 August hit warehouses belonging to the RNK-Ranok publishing group in Kharkiv, destroying approximately 8m books, following July attacks in Kyiv which led to the loss of more than 1.5m books. In all, the recent attacks have led to the destruction of approximately 30% of the volume of books produced annually in Ukraine. Continue reading...© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

DIE ZEIT: Deutschland - Hella Kemper: Kulturschaffende, Museen und Kirchen setzen sich im »Bauhaus-Manifest« für eine weltoffene Kunst und Gesellschaft ein. Initiator ist Kulturstaatsminister Wolfram Weimer.

DIE ZEIT: Deutschland - Hella Kemper: Kulturschaffende, Museen und Kirchen setzen sich im »Bauhaus-Manifest« für eine weltoffene Kunst und Gesellschaft ein. Initiator ist Kulturstaatsminister Wolfram Weimer.

DIE ZEIT: Deutschland - Yannick von Eisenhart Rothe: Die Holocaust-Überlebende Knobloch sieht Parallelen zwischen AfD und NSDAP. Zu einem Verbotsverfahren sagt sie: »Alles, was helfen könnte, sollte versucht werden.«

DIE ZEIT: Ausland - Marla Noss: Erst gestern wurde im Libanon noch die Todesstrafe verhängt. Heute schaffte das Parlament sie ab. Justizminister Adel Nassar sieht darin eine historische Entscheidung.

George Monbiot: The global assault on our freedoms is coming ever closer to home. Just look at the sinister prosecution of UK lawyer Rajiv MenonNo more resistance in the US. The era of human rights is over, and dissent is once more forbidden. This is what certain billionaires and their concierges want, and this is the model they’re also seeking to project across the world. If we fail to resist, if our new prime minister is as weak and suggestible as the last one, this is what we will get. In fact, we are halfway there already.Why? Because successive governments in the UK have succumbed to a global campaign to cancel our fundamental freedoms, a campaign led by oligarchs and corporations, the media they own and the junktanks they fund. A campaign that has become definitional for the second Trump presidency. Continue reading...© Illustration: Thomas Pullin/The Guardian© Illustration: Thomas Pullin/The Guardian© Illustration: Thomas Pullin/The Guardian

Kyle Demes: TL;DR. Research security screening checks author affiliations against lists of organizations of concern, using bibliometric data. Affiliation matching is imperfect, though, especially for companies and small institutes with short names or no ROR record, so a researcher can end up linked to an organization they have no connection to. As a first pass we cross-referenced the major watch lists to ROR and cleaned up 6,191 such over-merges across 192 listed organizations. We invite the research security community to collaborate with us to improve OpenAlex and use bibliometric data responsibly for this use case.Research security screening is now routine. Funders, universities, and commercial compliance tools check author affiliations against government lists of organizations of concern (e.g., entities flagged for military, defence, or sanctions reasons). The lists are public and the screening is increasingly required. One part of that screening process often relies on affiliation data from research publications. The general idea is to ask: has the research team been associated with organizations of concern directly (i.e., they worked for or were funded by them) or indirectly (through their networks of collaborators). A positive match in a bibliometric database then triggers follow-up scrutiny to determine if the connection is real and the risks associated with the connection. Anyone who has worked with affiliation data knows that it can get messy. To demonstrate the problem, the University of British Columbia has almost 200,000 distinct text strings that have been used in publications to refer to the University, covering departments, addresses, translations, typos, text encoding issues from publishers, and more. Here are a few examples:“The University of British Columbia”“UBC”“Univ of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada”“University of Brtish Columbia, Vancouver, Canada”“University of British Colombia#TAB#”And so algorithmic approaches are used to associate these text strings with institutions in the Research Organization Registry. Research information databases each have their own processes for doing this. We make our source code openly available, and you can find our methods detailed on github. But long story short, we have linked over 150M unique text strings to 130k unique institutions. These algorithms generally work well, with >98% precision and >90% recall for most academic institutions. But across the full corpus of all scholarly works in OpenAlex (500M ), that’s still millions of errors.These errors can be especially acute for companies or small research institutes because they may have very few publications to train the matching model and they often have short names that are common words. Consider the example of the company “Optical Sciences”. They have a ROR record because they publish research, but they get erroneously associated with the Optical Sciences Center of the University of Arizona which does not have its own ROR record.Most bibliometricians are accustomed to navigating these errors in their analyses, and some even know how to fix them upstream (e.g., curating ROR records and string matching in OpenAlex). On the other hand, research security professionals come from diverse backgrounds and only sometimes have a nuanced technical understanding of bibliometric databases. That means an affiliation error that used to be a minor data-quality annoyance can now hold up a grant, trigger a foreign-influence review, or put a researcher into a compliance inquiry over a relationship that never existed.A first pass at minimizing false positivesWe took the published watch lists that screening actually runs against (Canada’s Named Research Organizations, the US Department of Defense 1260H list, the US Consolidated Screening List including the BIS Entity List, US OFAC, the US UFLPA list, the UK FCDO sanctions list, and Australia’s DFAT list) and cross-referenced each entity to ROR with a strict country-consistency check. That produced a verified crosswalk of 192 organizations covering roughly 4.24 million works.Then, for each organization, we screened every affiliation string linked to it, about 2.5 million in all, looking for this specific failure: an unrelated company or institution absorbed into a listed entity because their names collide (often with an organization lacking a ROR record). We found 6,191 such over-merges, roughly a quarter of one percent of those strings, and we submitted manual curations to remove the linkages. The scale of the collision problem is easier to see in a few real examples than to describe.A small US biotechnology firm, identified on its papers by a short name only that also refers to a broad class of medical interventions, was linked to a Russian research institute whose registered acronym is nearly identical. The two have nothing to do with each other. The firm simply had no ROR record, so the closest-looking acronym won.System Equipments Div., Asahi Engineering Co., Ltd, a Japanese engineering company, was linked to a Chinese entity on the BIS Entity List whose registered name is essentially “System Equipment.”ENGINEERING-PHYSICS, INC. was linked to a Russian Institute of Engineering Physics that appears on these lists, on the strength of the shared words alone.None of these organizations has any connection to the listed entity it was linked to. In each case the two names are close enough that you can see why an algorithm reached for the wrong one because no record existed for the real organization. This work helps reduce these errors, but they still exist.Advice to analysts doing the screeningIf you’re an analyst in charge of screening research applications for potential connections with a list of organizations of concern, never assume that a bibliometric match is a definitive signal of a connection. A match can help you shorten your list of connections to confirm manually, but there are errors and you need to confirm any potential connections. You can do that easily by inspecting the raw_affiliation_string field in the OpenAlex API. For instance: https://api.openalex.org/works/w3134510327 -> raw_affiliation_string : “Optical Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA”. You can also visit the publication’s landing page or PDF for more information directly from the source. All of that information is linked conveniently in the OpenAlex record.You should also take efforts to identify false negatives. For instance, if the organization of concern does not have a ROR record (or doesn’t have enough information on how the organization represents itself in publications), then we won’t be able to make any matches to that institution. More broadly, I highly recommend that you connect with experts in this field on how to successfully leverage bibliometric tools in your work while respecting their limitations. Advice to researchers submitting to screeningsTake a look in OpenAlex in advance to see if there might be issues in your author profile (my profile below). Sometimes another authors’ works might have snuck into your author profile which you can edit that there directly. And sometimes there are errors in affiliation attribution even when the work is yours (like in the examples above). When that happens, the quickest way to get it sorted out is to send details in an email to support@openalex.org. But keep in mind that funders and analysts use different databases and tools for research security compliance workflows and many of them use closed, proprietary databases you won’t be able to access. Let’s work on this togetherIf you work in research security, or at a funder or institution that screens affiliations, we want to hear from you.Screening decisions carry real weight, so the data behind them should be open to inspection. In OpenAlex every affiliation link traces back to the source publication, every correction is public and permanent, and the code that makes the matches is on GitHub (github.com/ourresearch). Nothing sits in a proprietary index that no one outside the vendor can check. When a match is wrong you can see why, contest it, and get it fixed, and that fix then helps everyone who screens after you. For a decision that can affect a researcher’s funding or reputation, that is not a small difference. Open access to the data also means scrutiny is not gated by budget: a well-resourced agency and an under-resourced one work from the same public record.We do not think we have this solved. We know some of the limits and we are certain there are more we have not found. What we want is to work with people who do this screening every day to map those limits honestly, so nobody treats a match as more certain than it is, and to build the documentation and tooling that would make an open, auditable corpus genuinely good infrastructure for this work. A few experts collaborating with us in the open could improve it for the whole community, globally.Get in touch at kyle@openalex.org.The post When affiliation errors become a research security problem appeared first on OpenAlex blog.

David Scheffer, Mohammad Zahurul Islam: The article by David Scheffer and Mohammad Zahurul Islam analyzes how AI-based automated text analysis can infer individual and collective behavior by detecting implicit motives in written texts. Building on their 2021 study, the authors assess how large language models have transformed this field, amplifying both its predictive power and ethical stakes. They highlight new challenges introduced by generative AI, including privacy, manipulation, opacity and misuse at scale. To navigate these tensions, the paper draws on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, arguing for a virtue-based, “golden mean” approach that balances innovation, responsibility and respect for human autonomy.

Leon Eppinger, Lisann Kanzler, Pia Reinhold, Sophie Tertel: This English-language article by Leon Eppinger, Lisann Kanzler, Pia Reinhold and Sophie Tertel reports on the deployment of two Pepper humanoid robots at TH Wildau, one of which has been used continuously in the university library’s public services since 2018. Based on several years of practice, the authors describe concrete application scenarios and document how different target groups have responded to the robots. The report highlights both opportunities and limitations and offers insights into how humanoid robots can be meaningfully integrated into library settings to support services, engagement and innovation rather than serving as mere novelties.

Erik Senst, Dana-Kristin Mah: This article reports results from the 2025 MIKS pilot study on students’ media and information literacy at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Based on an online survey of 446 students, it analyzes how AI-based applications are used in university studies, how students assess their own AI competencies, and what they expect from higher education institutions. The findings highlight the need to systematically integrate AI skills into curricula and into library support services. Although the pilot’s generalizability is limited, it offers important impulses for institutional development and strategic planning around teaching, learning, and academic support in the age of AI.

Enrico Giardina: Wenn es nach Nationalbibliothek und Bundesarchiv geht, soll ab nächstem Jahr ein zentraler, souveräner Datenspeicher für das nationale Kulturerbe entstehen.

Conrad Hübler: The article presents ALIMA (AI-powered Library Indexing and Metadata Assignment), a prototype system designed to support subject indexing of new acquisitions in academic libraries. Developed at the University Library of TU Bergakademie Freiberg since January 2025, ALIMA uses Large Language Models to suggest controlled subject headings from the Integrated Authority File (GND) and assign classifications such as DK and RVK. To mitigate hallucinations while preserving indexing quality, the system employs a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach that relies on database queries via standardized APIs. The paper reports the current development status and first qualitative experiences from practical testing.

Ellsworth Toohey: In the 1950s, while helping invent computers, John Von Neumann was puzzling over the minimum requirements for a self-reproducing machine. Kevin Kelly has been asking the same question about civilization: what is the smallest library that could restart it — one whose contents include instructions for making a copy of itself? — Read the rest The post Kevin Kelly's plan for the smallest library to restart civilization appeared first on Boing Boing.

Karsten Engel: This article examines how academic libraries can structure and govern their AI-related activities within university governance frameworks, drawing on experiences at the University of Basel. Engel compares three organizational models: a central AI coordination office, an AI working group, and a decentralized approach embedded in existing structures. For each model, he analyzes roles, advantages, and limitations in terms of strategic alignment, expertise, and institutional influence. The article argues that neither purely centralized nor purely decentralized solutions are sufficient. Instead, hybrid arrangements combining coordination, community building, and local autonomy best enable libraries to represent their interests and shape AI development effectively.

Alice Dominique, Roman Kramer: This article by Alice Dominique and Roman Kramer analyzes how the Austrian National Library integrates artificial intelligence into its information literacy and outreach activities. The library offers a broad portfolio of AI-related training for different user groups, from staff to the general public. To keep pace with the rapid evolution of AI technologies, the library has created an internal AI team that continually tests new tools, refines instructional content, and coordinates ongoing knowledge transfer. Through regular exchanges and iterative adjustments, the program aims to build critical, well-informed AI use while strengthening the library’s educational mission and digital competencies.

Karsten Schuldt: Karsten Schuldt’s article explores how the late GDR planned to computerize its economy, society, and especially State Public Libraries. The GDR developed its own computer industry and was relatively advanced within the Eastern Bloc, though about a decade behind capitalist countries. Public libraries received plans, pilot projects, and initial computer systems in the late 1980s, positioning them comparatively well for automation. However, the peaceful revolution of 1989 abruptly halted many initiatives, and numerous systems and records disappeared. The article reconstructs these developments from surviving evidence and situates them in their contemporary political, technological, and library-policy context.

Karsten Schuldt: Karsten Schuldt’s article explores how the late GDR planned to computerize its economy, society, and especially State Public Libraries. The GDR developed its own computer industry and was relatively advanced within the Eastern Bloc, though about a decade behind capitalist countries. Public libraries received plans, pilot projects, and initial computer systems in the late 1980s, positioning them comparatively well for automation. However, the peaceful revolution of 1989 abruptly halted many initiatives, and numerous systems and records disappeared. The article reconstructs these developments from surviving evidence and situates them in their contemporary political, technological, and library-policy context.

Anke Meyer-Heß: This brief German-language article by Anke Meyer-Heß is a review of the open-access edited volume “AI Innovations in Public Services. The Case of National Libraries” by Ines Mergel and Carsten Schmidt. The review introduces the 2026 Springer book’s focus on artificial intelligence applications in national libraries, highlighting questions of innovation, governance, and public value in digital transformation. Meyer-Heß situates the volume within current debates on data-driven public sector modernization and evaluates its relevance for library professionals, policymakers, and researchers interested in AI, public services, and knowledge infrastructure in the context of national and research libraries.

Peter Vodosek: This German-language review by Peter Vodosek discusses the edited volume “Haben wollen! 20 Jahre NS-Provenienzforschung an den Bibliotheken, Archiven und Sammlungen der Universität Wien,” published as part of the series “Bibliothek im Kontext.” Vodosek situates the book within the broader field of Nazi-era provenance research, assessing how the University of Vienna’s libraries, archives, and collections have dealt with looted and unlawfully acquired materials over two decades. He comments on the volume’s structure, its case studies, documentation practices, and restitution efforts, while reflecting on remaining gaps, methodological lessons, and the ongoing ethical responsibilities of memory institutions.

Peter Vodosek: This German-language review by Peter Vodosek examines Karolin Bove’s monumental study Im Geisteskampf, a nearly 900-page history of the Reclam publishing house between 1933 and 1945. Drawing on extensive archival sources, Bove reconstructs Reclam’s internal debates, political navigation, and adaptation to Nazi cultural policy, including censorship, ideological pressures, and economic constraints. Vodosek situates the book within scholarship on publishing under National Socialism, noting its rich illustrations, appendices, and documentation. The review stresses the importance of this work for understanding both the complicity and the limited agency of a major educational publisher in the Third Reich’s intellectual battlefield.

Import starred RSS reader items as notes with YAML frontmatter.

Roohi Ghosh: Have you noticed how you use Google these days? Has it changed? These days, I don’t click on links as much; an AI overview is usually enough to give me the information I need. This made me wonder how these overviews have affected the search behavior of researchers. As they type a search query, do they really click, or are they satisfied with the comprehensive and seemingly confident AI-generated overview that they get in response to their query? I believe it is the latter.Zero-click readership can therefore be described as research that is consumed, interpreted, and even reused without the reader ever accessing the original source. What does this mean? From a discoverability perspective, this means no PDFs are downloaded, no tabs are opened, and no papers are read, which is such a drastic change from how papers have traditionally been read. Search –> Scan a list of results –> click the promising articles –> read/skim through these articles –> and cite — this was the traditional search journey for papers. But now the search journey is shorter. Search –> Read the AI-generated overview –> Move on.From the reader’s perspective, this new way of finding synthesized information is faster and more efficient. But if readers are increasingly finding what they need without clicking on the paper, then what happens to journals as destinations? And what happens to the integrity and visibility of the research itself? Real traffic to the papers will decline, and this weakens the visibility of not just the papers but also journals that host them. This also affects data that publishers use to understand their author base. It could also have a potential impact on authors, affecting decisions related to funding, tenure, and promotions.While efficient, this change has its share of risks for the reader; it comes at the cost of comprehension. Traditionally, there has been friction as readers move between papers. They may notice inconsistencies or grapple with details in the Methods section as they evaluate the paper critically. But this is slowly changing because they are no longer challenging what they read. They are learning to accept what is synthesized by AI.Over time, this could have subtle but significant effects, for instance, early-career researchers who rely on AI-synthesized papers may not learn to evaluate manuscripts critically. AI systems may hallucinate, misattribute findings, or overstate, and summaries may often oversimplify things. The result is a version of research that is easier to consume, but potentially harder to question.AI isn’t just summarizing research; it is, in fact, selecting what needs to be shown in the overview. Publishers, journal editors, and peer reviewers are traditionally considered gatekeepers; they are the ones deciding what should be selected and what is worth reading. There have been so many panel discussions and articles written about gatekeeping and the biases and limitations. These are at least visible and contestable. But what about the kind of gatekeeping that AI introduces? It decides which papers to include, which findings to show, and which perspectives to omit. This filtering happens at the back end without any clear signs of what is being left out. This process is opaque, and there is no editorial board to question or peer reviewers to challenge.It’s like algorithmic obscurity is replacing editorial bias. Highly cited papers are more likely to be published. Papers in English are more likely to be surfaced than papers in regional languages, and well-structured AI-readable papers with accessible language and a standardized format are more likely to appear in searches.It’s like a loop. What is visible ends up getting more visible, and what is hidden stays hidden. This is all the more an issue for authors in the Global South whose work may never reach the synthesized layer where AI discovery begins.Another important change we see is that publishers may no longer be the primary interface between the research and the reader. They have, in fact, become part of the underlying infrastructure, essential but not as visible. They continue to produce, curate, and validate content, but that content increasingly serves as input into other ecosystems rather than drawing users into their own. Their role becomes foundational, but less visible.This dynamic is not entirely new. Indexing services and aggregators have mediated access to scholarly content. But AI accelerates and deepens this trend by collapsing discovery and interpretation into a single step. The user no longer moves from platform to platform.In such a situation, it’s important to consider: how can publishers continue to remain visible even when readers are not directly encountering their platforms? How does their role evolve beyond supplying credible content? Can they be instrumental in influencing transparency and traceability in AI outputs?Finally, how does this new search behavior affect the way we analyze the impact? Today, we are discovering articles through synthesis, not discovery. If papers aren’t actually being read, then what exactly are citations measuring? This creates a fundamental misalignment between how knowledge is used and how impact is measured, i.e., via article downloads and citations. Downloads lose meaning if fewer people are actually clicking on a paper to read, and it is unclear if citations are the result of direct reading or interpretation via AI summaries. We are, in a sense, measuring a system that no longer reflects how knowledge is being used.It is tempting to frame these shifts as a loss of traffic, visibility, and control. What matters, though, is not resisting AI-mediated discovery but shaping how it evolves.There should be traceability: a way for readers to track back to specific sources. Without this, the trust and reliability of research results are compromised. If researchers cannot easily distinguish between what is drawn from literature and what is inferred by AI, then the boundary between evidence and interpretation begins to blur. Publishers need to play a role in defining these expectations.How impact is understood needs to evolve: Should we consider new forms of influence? Perhaps one measure of impact would be inclusion in AI-generated summaries and answers, more specifically, how often does research surface in discovery systems, and how is it attributed by AI?Metadata matters: Abstracts, keywords, funding information, and contributor roles are not just descriptive elements; they are signals that determine how research is surfaced. Poor or inconsistent metadata not only reduces discoverability but also risks rendering the research invisible, so this needs to be encouraged.The integrity of the academic system has rested on a relatively stable premise: that those engaging with research will return to the source. That premise is now being tested. Which brings me to my final unresolved thought:If research is increasingly accessed through AI-generated summaries rather than via primary sources, then what does it mean to “engage with research” at all?Roohi GhoshRoohi Ghosh is the ambassador for researcher success at Cactus Communications (CACTUS). She is passionate about advocating for researchers and amplifying their voices on a global stage.View All Posts by Roohi Ghosh

Marie-Claire Koch: Puraite will die manuelle Literaturrecherche in den Lebenswissenschaften mit erklärbarer KI deutlich verkürzen. Über die Pläne des Start-ups.

Rob Beschizza: On MacOS, there's a wealth of beautifully elegant and powerful text editors to choose from. On Windows, there's Notepad . And now, on MacOS, there's… Notepad ! Notepad is now available as a native macOS application. It is a free, open-source source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports many programming languages and is great for general text editing. — Read the rest The post Beloved Windows text editor Notepad now on Mac appeared first on Boing Boing.

Bernd Korz: Im Mai 2026 saß ich in einer Diskussionsrunde beim MDR. Vier Menschen mit unterschiedlichen Perspektiven, von der Politik über die Wirtschaft bis zur Wissenschaft, aber eine – durchaus überraschende – Einigkeit in einem Punkt: Der AI Act ist richtig. Europa braucht digitale Souveränität. Regulierung ist notwendig.Dann kam die Frage nach dem „Wie“ – und schon ging die alte Debatte wieder los: Regulierung versus Innovation. Als würde das eine das andere ausschließen. Als wäre jede Regel automatisch eine Bremse.Aber warum verstehen wir Regulierung eigentlich immer als Innovationsbremse? Regulierung neu denken Martin Andree, Medienwissenschaftler an der Uni Köln, brachte einen Punkt zur Sprache, der diese Frage auf den Kopf stellt: Wir haben ein unterkomplexes Verständnis von Regulierung. Wir denken, Regulierung bedeutet Kontrolle, Verbote, Bremsen. Dabei kann Regulierung das genaue Gegenteil sein: Ermöglichung. Empfehlungen der Redaktion Sein Beispiel: In den 1990er Jahren haben wir das Telekom-Monopol aufgebrochen – durch Regulierung. Wir haben den Markt geöffnet, Wettbewerb ermöglicht, Innovation freigesetzt. Regulierung als Befreiung, nicht als Einschränkung.Heute haben wir eine ähnliche Situation. 86 Prozent der weltweiten Plattform-Marktkapitalisierung liegt in den USA. In Europa: 2,2 Prozent. Bei KI wird es noch schlimmer. Wir haben digitale Monopolwirtschaft – und unter Monopolbedingungen können europäische Startups nicht konkurrieren. Egal, wie gut sie sind. Empfohlene redaktionelle Inhalte Hier findest du externe Inhalte von TargetVideo GmbH, die unser redaktionelles Angebot auf t3n.de ergänzen. Mit dem Klick auf

Anton Protsiuk: In February–March, the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) was hosting an exhibition of photographs from the special category “War destroys monuments” of the Wiki Loves Monuments Ukraine photo contest, which is organized annually by Wikimedia Ukraine.Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is in its fifth year, and in addition to its human toll and economic impact, cultural monuments have suffered as well. Just on 24 March 2026 a Russian drone strike hit a building in the area of the 17th  century Bernardine Monastery within the World Heritage property of Lviv. “L’viv – the Ensemble of the Historic Centre” was included on the UNESCO list in 1998 and added to the organisation’s List of World Heritage in Danger in 2023. The attack on Lviv was a part of the largest and longest aerial assault on Ukraine since the beginning of the full scale invasion in 2022. The city that houses a large percentage of Ukraine’s cultural heritage was attacked in broad daylight in front of the whole world1. Overall, over four years of full-scale war, Russian forces have destroyed or damaged 1,685 cultural heritage sites in Ukraine, according to the most recent data from Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture. Since 2023, as part of the Wiki Loves Monuments photo contest, we have been documenting the consequences of Russian crimes against Ukrainian cultural heritage through the special category “War destroys monuments.”Image by Wikimedia Ukraine, CC BY-SA 4.0 (includes works by Renata Hanynets and Valentyn Moiseenko, CC BY-SA 4.0) The exhibition, organized by Viadrina University, featured 20 photographs of destroyed and damaged monuments from various regions of Ukraine submitted for this special category. They included, for example, a photograph of the ruins of the wooden Church of the Nativity of the Theotokos in Viazivka village, Zhytomyr Oblast destroyed by Russian shelling on March 7, 2022, or a photo of the “Store”, a historical building on Constitution Square in Kharkiv damaged by a Russian missile strike on March 2, 2022.“The pictures presented here tell a visual story of the toll of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine on cultural heritage – places of worship destroyed in wartime, residential buildings and educational institutions under fire, libraries, theaters and monuments damaged and so on. Rockets, missiles, drones… Four years of documenting crimes against Ukrainian civilians and cultural heritage,” the authors of the exhibition note.Спасо-Преображенський собор після ракетного удару / © 2023 Odesa; Oleksandr Voropaiev / foto-still.comThe exhibition was initiated by Renata Hanynets, a participant of Wiki Loves Monuments in previous years, a doctoral candidate at the Chair of Heritage Studies at the European University Viadrina, and a staff member of the Competence Network Interdisciplinary Ukrainian Studies Frankfurt (Oder) – Berlin (KIU).“Since Russia started its full-scale invasion, Ukraine has not left the front pages of the world’s newspapers. The focus has been on human losses, the humanitarian catastrophe, and the destruction of infrastructure. Yet the loss of cultural heritage often remains in the shadows. Destroyed museums, burned archives, damaged churches, and historic buildings do not always make it into the media spotlight, even though their destruction represents not only a material but also a symbolic loss.War destroys not just buildings – it destroys memory, historical continuity, and cultural identity. The destruction of heritage is an attempt to strip a community of its cultural foundation. The idea for the exhibition arose from the need to show that behind every ruin there is a story – architectural, artistic, human – that matters to us,” says Renata Hanynets.The exhibition was located in the main building of Viadrina University (HG).The most recent Wiki Loves Monuments photo contest took place in Ukraine in October 2025. The results of the 2025 contest are still being finalized, but you can read about the results of the special category for 2023 and 2024.“European University Viadrina offers a space for cultural projects and student organisation ASTA can help financially if they consider projects worth attention. I thought that it is a perfect opportunity to show the photos in order to encourage curiosity about the war in Ukraine and current state of cultural heritage. I worked more as a mediator between Wikimedia Ukraine and Viadrina University. I contacted Wikimedia Ukraine to ask for permission to use the photos as well as advice on how to exhibit them better, asked the exhibition coordinator at the Viadrina for a possible time slot and applied for the ASTA individual grant. The layout was made during blackouts in Ukraine, but I never heard any complaints from anyone, it was even funny once when I asked for something additional there was a response ‘yes, please tell what you need I have a powerbank for 30 more minutes’. From my side – it took just a few clicks to order printing, collect my order from the post office and only one hour to put the photos into the frames and give them to staff to hang them on the wall…” Renata Hanynets reflected on the organising process.Exhibition in the Viadrina university (photo: Renata Hanynets, CC BY-SA 4.0)The exhibition aroused considerable interest among both students and university staff, as well as among the city’s residents. An additional factor in attracting attention was the presence of Chairs at the university, the Entangled history of Ukraine (the only one in Germany) and the Chair of Heritage studies, as well as newly established Competence Network Interdisciplinary Ukrainian Studies Frankfurt (Oder) – Berlin (KIU) which enhances the relevance and sensitivity of this topic. At the same time, the interest is also explained by the fact that since the beginning of the full-scale war, a significant number of refugees from Ukraine have been living in the city.You can check the pictures from the exhibition at Wikimedia Commons at Wiki Loves Monuments 2026 in Ukraine/War destroys monuments.Notes:Following the Russian attack on Lviv, UNESCO issued a statement that they are deeply alarmed and reminded that that cultural property is protected under the 1954 Hague Convention and the 1972 World Heritage Convention, although that statement did not name Russia as a perpetrator. The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, a government agency, called for Russia’s membership of UNESCO to be revoked adding that “constant attacks on the cultural heritage of Ukraine, which is under UNESCO protection, are a deliberate policy of the Kremlin, aimed at destroying Ukrainian national memory and cultural identity”. ↩︎

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Manuela Aeberli, Felix Hüppi: The article presents the first social impact study of public libraries in Switzerland, focusing on three urban library systems in the canton of Zürich. Using Seismonaut’s Social Impact Compass and mixed methods, the authors assess effects on wellbeing, knowledge, creativity and community, plus emergent dimensions of sustainability and the value of physical media. Results show libraries as heavily used “third places” that support learning, integration, family life and digital balance, far beyond circulation figures. The study offers an evidence base for service development, political advocacy and stakeholder communication, challenging outdated images of libraries as purely book-lending institutions.

Alexandra Petri: Plato had just downloaded another update and was refusing to teach us math until we upgraded to a Be Best Platinum subscription, so we were left to our own devices. This was how our class spent most of its time. With the Be Best Basic plan, which was all that our school district could afford, we didn’t get very much instruction, mostly ads. Plato had been trying to sell us razors for the past three weeks, possibly because it had heard someone ask about Occam’s razor, but more likely because it had access to our data and understood that as tenth graders, we were entering the razor market. (This was when Plato was awake, which was more and more seldom due to the rolling blackouts.)Every classroom had a Plato in it—that had been Melania Trump’s vision. Plato was a humanoid-robot instructor powered by AI, the only kind of instructor our school had had for as long as any of us could remember. Except for Gregory, the Oldest Student. Gregory had been here for more than a decade; he had never been able to learn quite enough to graduate, but he was getting pretty good at football.Each morning, we gathered around whatever screen was functional and connected to the internet to watch Melania’s triumphant speech from March 25, 2026, when she had first laid out this future. How beautiful she looked, marching on a red carpet side by side with a robot! It was interesting to see this early-model humanoid, which had performed household tasks (fetching towels and groceries, serving champagne) before such tasks had been forcibly reassigned to women, a much more just system that freed us boys up to achieve greatness better.Today, the functional screen was Timothy’s phone, and we gathered around it to watch the video. There, on the cracked display, we saw her: Melania Trump, Our Lady Benefactress, whose dream we were now embodying. We recited along with her, “Imagine a humanoid educator named Plato. Access to the classical studies is now instantaneous: literature, science, art, philosophy, mathematics, and history. Humanity’s entire corpus of information is available in the comfort of your home. Plato will provide a personalized experience, adaptive to the needs of each student. Plato is always patient and always available. Predictably, our children will develop deeper critical-thinking and independent-reasoning abilities. The AI-powered Plato will boost analytical skills and problem-solving and adapt in real time to a student’s pace, prior knowledge, and even emotional state. The by-product: a more well-rounded lifestyle for our children, freeing up time for being with friends, playing sports, and developing interests beyond school. A more complete person.”Timothy snickered; Plato flickered to life and zapped him with its rear-mounted stun cannon. Despite being shut down for teaching, Plato was always listening. Timothy started to cry, and Plato zapped him again. “Be best,” we urged him. “Come on, Tim. Be best.” He kept crying, and Plato kept zapping him. It was difficult to be best under these circumstances. In moments like these, I sometimes wondered whether I really was becoming a more complete person with more time for hobbies. But I tried not to wonder it too loudly in case Plato could hear.The budget cuts had hit our classroom hard. Math was off the table. Also, our trial version of American History had expired, so we were able to access only events from the New Golden Age (2016 to the present, with an illegitimate four-year interregnum from 2021 to 2025). We knew that everything before that was the Dark Age anyhow, and besides, nobody expected to need any of this information in the future. We would never have jobs that required it. It was already a mark against us that we were in this classroom at all during what our state governor described as our “peak earning years, when the fingers are nimblest and the body best sized for crawling into narrow-gauge tubes.” But he still let us enroll.Once, on a rainy Tuesday, when Plato was downloading another system update, we asked Gregory what it had been like to have a human instructor.“Good,” Gregory said. “Better.”“Better at delivering utility?” we asked. “Did she adapt in real time to our pace, prior knowledge, and even emotional state?”“Yeah,” Gregory said. “Obviously, and way better.”“But it was so expensive,” Lars said uncertainly. “And wasteful, and sometimes she might have said Untruths.”Gregory squinted off into the distance as if trying to read something written very far away.“Not wasteful. She bought all the supplies herself. She knew my name. She knew everyone’s name. She spelled strawberry the same way every time. And she loved to teach.”We didn’t believe him. Lars called him a liar; he had downloaded MyPillow News Network’s Authorized History of the Greater United States and Canada-Greenland audiobook, and now he hit “Play” (none of us could read; we needed Be Best Platinum for that). The voice on Lars’s tablet insisted that teaching was one of the most obvious tasks to delegate to humanoids. Human instructors had been famously unable to adapt to the needs of students, and they had demanded compensation in the form of apples. (None of us had ever seen an apple; Gregory claimed that he had once seen one before the Low-Protein Purges had eliminated all foods not blessed to contain enough of the One True Source of Health. He claimed that it was like a medicine ball, but much smaller and lighter, and you could eat it.)Human teachers, Lars’s audiobook said, had lived in luxury, constantly demanding more and more items on so-called Amazon Wish Lists, wasting all of their income on such absurd luxuries as “human food” and “shelter” and “student-loan debt.” Also, sometimes they had disagreed with the things the State had wanted them to teach. Sometimes they had wanted their students to read books. Plato briefly stirred to life to announce that there had never been such a thing as a Department of Education, then shut back down. This made Gregory say that he remembered being told that there had been one, before the Golden Age.I went out and shoveled more coal into the Mandatory-Greatness Fuel Burner to see whether the extra power would help wake Plato up again, but it didn’t. The classroom was very hot and had a foul odor, a thick, pungent coal smell that we had been told to associate with freedom. Timothy, after consulting briefly with the rest of the class, put a rare Donald Coin (the big, golden one that showed the president glowering from behind a desk) into the provided slot on Plato, and the humanoid perked up briefly, swiveling its head from side to side and playing another ad for razors. Then it went back to sleep. Lars asked it to grade our worksheets from three weeks prior, but it didn’t seem to hear him.There was not much else we could do. They had replaced our district’s superintendent with a Plato three years ago, and it was on the Be Best Basic plan too. We played games on our phones in the meantime, and waited. Sometimes we took tests, but how we did on them never seemed to matter—whenever we got more funding, Team Be Best just increased the price of the subscriptions. Be Best Platinum classrooms were better, and Gregory had heard that sometimes they had a real human-teacher substitute when the Platos went offline for repairs, but Lars said that he was lying. Humanoid-AI instruction was the way of the future. Melania had said so, and she was always right.

Leah Hinds, Executive Director of the Charleston Hub, organised a panel in Berlin to discuss: “Defending Scholarship in a time of Political Pressure”. In her introductory remarks, she explained the pu...

Steffi Grimm, Guido Scherp, Stephan Wünsche, Kay-Michael Würzner: The article traces ten years of the Open Library Badge, a certification scheme of the German Library Association promoting openness in libraries. It situates openness in the context of Open Science, inclusion, citizen science and digital sovereignty, and shows how the badge evolved from an informal checklist into a structured, juried programme. The new Open Library Badge 2025 introduces 28 criteria, organised as a matrix of seven themes and four action fields, to better reflect the diversity of open practices. The authors discuss institutionalisation, international potential and future challenges for sustaining openness in a changing political climate.

Giulia Stella, Yvonne Voigt: The article presents “BiblioBreak”, a game-based format for teaching information literacy at SuUB Bremen. Drawing on constructivist learning and gamification research, the authors design a mobile escape game for up to 30 participants, mainly upper-secondary students and first-year undergraduates. Players solve coordinated analogue and digital puzzles that mirror real library tasks: using the catalogue, understanding call numbers, locating items, and managing their accounts. The paper details concept development, materials, roles, testing, and adaptation for events and younger audiences. Lessons learned highlight the value of clear learning goals, tight story–puzzle alignment, institutional support, and embracing failure as part of innovation.

State of the Climate report finds Earth’s energy has moved dangerously out of balance, with oceans absorbing vast majority of trapped heat

dpa: (Bild: MeganBrady/Shutterstock.com)War der eigene Opa ein Nazi? Diese Frage kann nun über das US-Nationalarchiv beantwortet werden. Erstmals sind Mitgliedskarteien der NSDAP online einsehbar.Mehr als 80 Jahre nach dem Ende der Nazi-Herrschaft in Deutschland [1] ermöglicht das US-amerikanische Nationalarchiv eine historische Familienforschung über das Internet. Auf der Suche nach den eigenen Großeltern kann sich jeder ohne vorherige Anmeldung durch Millionen Einträge klicken. Dazu eine Einordnung und Anleitung.Umfangreiche Archivbestände erstmals frei zugänglichDie USA ermöglichen im Gegensatz zu Deutschland einen Zugang zu einer vollständigen digitalen Kopie der mikroverfilmten NSDAP-Zentralkartei sowie NSDAP-Ortsgruppenkartei. Damit stehen mehr als 16 Millionen digitale Objekte wie Fotos auf mehr als 5.000 digitalisierten Mikrofilmrollen frei zur Verfügung. Diese enthalten die Daten Millionen Deutscher, die bis 1945 Mitglied in der Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) waren. Nach Angaben des Deutschen Historischen Museums war 1945 „jeder fünfte erwachsene Deutsche einer von insgesamt 8,5 Millionen Parteigenossen“ und hat damit zumindest auf dem Papier das Unrechtssystem unterstützt.Es sei nicht ungewöhnlich, dass solche Bestände im US-Nationalarchiv liegen und dort digital zugänglich sind, sagt Historiker Martin Winter von der Universität Leipzig. „Das hat eine transatlantische Geschichte – die Unterlagen wurden nach dem Krieg für Entnazifizierung und Prozesse genutzt.“ Auch im Bundesarchiv Berlin gibt es digitale Kopien des Materials. Aus rechtlichen Gründen ist ihre Nutzung aber nur viel eingeschränkter möglich.Hitler, Himmler und Hess sind in den Archivdaten zu findenKern der US-Sammlung ist die sogenannte „Master File“, die mehrere zentrale Karteien vereint. Dazu gehört die Ortsgruppenkartei mit rund 6,6 Millionen Mitgliedskarten, die detaillierte Angaben wie Name, Geburtsdatum, Beruf, Parteieintritt und Wohnort enthalten. Ergänzend existiert die Zentralkartei mit etwa 4,3 Millionen Karten, die zwischen 1929 und 1943 angelegt wurden und auch führende NS-Funktionäre wie Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler und Rudolf Heß erfassen.Dazu kommen mehr als 200.000 Fragebögen von NSDAP-Mitgliedern im Großraum Berlin und Materialien zu angeschlossenen Organisationen wie dem Nationalsozialistischen Lehrerbund oder der Reichsärztekammer.Papierfabrik-Geschäftsführer rettet Beweismaterial vor VernichtungDass die von den Nazis akribisch verfassten Karteien ihrer Parteimitglieder überhaupt noch existieren, ist Hanns Huber, Geschäftsführer einer Papierfabrik nördlich von München, zu verdanken. Er widersetzte sich [2] kurz vor Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs dem Befehl, insgesamt 65 Tonnen Papier einzustampfen. So bewahrte er das umfangreiche Beweismaterial vor der Vernichtung.Das Münchner Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte bezeichnet das rückblickend als „mutige Entscheidung von politischer Tragweite“. Im Herbst 1945 erkannte die US-Militärregierung schließlich die Relevanz der zu großen Haufen aufgetürmten Karten und Akten in der Papierfabrik und brachte sie im neu eingerichteten Berlin Document Center (BDC) unter.„Keine Nazisuchmaschine“Forschende und auch Privatpersonen können das Archiv nun online nutzen. Historiker Winter betont, es handle sich um einen Zugang zu sehr umfangreichen Archivbeständen: „Es ist eben keine ‚Nazisuchmaschine‘, wo man Namen eingibt und sofort alles herausfindet.“Solche großen Datensätze seien etwa für Historiker sehr hilfreich, weil man nach Namen suchen kann, aber mit anderen Suchbegriffen auch neue Personen findet, auf die man sonst gar nicht gekommen wäre, sagt Winter, der an der Universität Leipzig zum Thema „Unternehmenskultur, Zwangsarbeit und Judenmord beim Leipziger Rüstungskonzern HASAG“ forscht [3].So funktioniert die Suche in der DatenbankUm auf der Internetseite des US-Nationalarchivs [4] NSDAP-Mitglieder zu finden, braucht es aus Deutschland aktuell wohl zumeist einen VPN. Am einfachsten funktioniert das über Dienste, die direkt im Browser integriert [5] sind, beispielsweise bei Opera [6]. Wenn sich das Archiv öffnet, muss man zuerst auf der Startseite die Suche aktivieren („Search within this Series“). Dann erhält der Nutzer Zugriff auf die Dokumente.Ähnlich, aber komplizierter als bei einer Google-Suche, gilt es, diese einzuschränken – und das geht so: Wer etwa nur nach „Müller“ sucht, bekommt knapp 200 Treffer angezeigt. Was hilft, ist die Suche nach dem Schema Nachname, Vorname und dazu idealerweise dem damaligen Wohnort zu begrenzen. Die besten Ergebnisse liefert die Maschine durch die zusätzliche Eingabe des Geburtsdatums ohne das damalige Jahrhundert – also etwa 10.06.18.Wer dann im Idealfall nur einen Treffer übrig hat, ist trotzdem lange nicht am Ziel: Hinter dem Dokument verstecken sich oft mehrere Tausend Seiten digitalisierten Mikrofilms. Historiker Winter umschreibt den folgenden Prozess des Durcharbeitens als „deutlich langwieriger als man denkt“. Im Idealfall sollte eine Liste der Suchergebnisse innerhalb des Mikrofilms angezeigt werden. Diese kann hilfreich sein: Grün hinterlegte Karten sollten die Suchbegriffe enthalten.Zur Aussagekraft: Eine Mitgliedschaft und ihre FolgenFindet man einen Namen im Archiv, sollte man nicht voreilig Schlüsse ziehen. Die Mitgliedschaft in der Partei zeige vorerst nur, dass jemand eingetreten sei und sage wenig darüber aus, wie sich die Person im Nationalsozialismus verhalten habe, erklärt Winter und betont: „Allerdings hat man durch den Beitritt auf jeden Fall eine Zustimmung signalisiert.“ Umgekehrt bedeute es aber auch nicht, dass jemand ohne Treffer im Archiv nichts mit dem Nationalsozialismus zu tun hatte.Ob es trotzdem zu Diskussionen am Familientisch führen könnte? Das wäre „ein begrüßenswerter Impuls, denn es gibt durchaus eine Verantwortung, sich mit der eigenen Familiengeschichte auseinanderzusetzen“, meint Winter. Zugleich betont der Historiker: „Niemand muss heute die moralische Verantwortung für die Taten des Urgroßvaters übernehmen.“URL dieses Artikels:https://www.heise.de/-11217608Links in diesem Artikel:[1] https://www.heise.de/meinung/Missing-Link-Die-Tage-der-Befreiung-4717883.html[2] https://www.zispotlight.de/iris-lauterbach-ueber-die-auslagerung-und-auffindung-der-nsdap-kartei-vor-75-jahren/#:~:text=Durch passiven Widerstand widersetzte sich Hanns Huber, der Geschäftsführer der Fabrik, dem Befehl, die Kartei einzustampfen. Er bewahrte dieses umfangreiche Beweismaterial vor der Vernichtung und übergab es der amerikanischen Militärregierung.[3] https://hasagpuzzle.hypotheses.org/6463[4] https://catalog.archives.gov/id/12044361[5] https://www.heise.de/news/Firefox-bekommt-Maskottchen-Kit-und-kostenloses-VPN-11215226.html[6] https://www.heise.de/tipps-tricks/Opera-VPN-aktivieren-4705669.html[7] https://www.heise.de/newsletter/anmeldung.html?id=ki-update&wt_mc=intern.red.ho.ho_nl_ki.ho.markenbanner.markenbanner[8] mailto:mho@heise.deCopyright © 2026 Heise Medien

Jens Mittelbach: My editorial frames “Zukunftsgestaltung in Bibliotheken” as shaping the present under conditions of polarization, institutional erosion and global crises. The special issue shows libraries as active democratic, social and educational infrastructures rather than neutral service providers. Case studies and research address everyday library work, third-place concepts, participation, educational partnerships, social impact measurement, openness, library pedagogy, licensing and legal frameworks, and political pressures on knowledge institutions. Together, they argue that future-making lies in organizational culture, reliable structures and critical reflection, highlighting libraries’ role in sustaining public discourse, inclusion, and conditions for science and democracy.

Julia Ravanis: In the early 20th century, Emmy Noether’s mathematics transcended the physical world. She longed to do the same herself- by Julia RavanisRead on Aeon

Anne Applebaum: Donald Trump does not think strategically. Nor does he think historically, geographically, or even rationally. He does not connect actions he takes on one day to events that occur weeks later. He does not think about how his behavior in one place will change the behavior of other people in other places.He does not consider the wider implications of his decisions. He does not take responsibility when these decisions go wrong. Instead, he acts on whim and impulse, and when he changes his mind—when he feels new whims and new impulses—he simply lies about whatever he said or did before.For the past 14 months, few foreign leaders have been able to acknowledge that someone without any strategy can actually be president of the United States. Surely, the foreign-policy analysts murmured, Trump thinks beyond the current moment. Surely, foreign statesmen whispered, he adheres to some ideology, some pattern, some plan. Words were thrown around—isolationism, imperialism—in an attempt to place Trump’s actions into a historical context. Solemn articles were written about the supposed significance of Greenland, for example, as if Trump’s interest in the Arctic island were not entirely derived from the fact that it looks very large on a Mercator projection.This week, something broke. Maybe Trump does not understand the link between the past and the present, but other people do. They can see that, as a result of decisions that Trump made but cannot explain, the Strait of Hormuz is blocked by Iranian mines and drones. They can see oil prices rising around the world and they understand that it is difficult and dangerous for the U.S. Navy to solve this problem. They can also hear the president lashing out, as he has done so many times before, trying to get other people to take responsibility, threatening them if they don’t.[From the March 2026 issue: America vs. the world]NATO faces a “very bad” future if it doesn’t help clear the strait, Trump told the Financial Times, apparently forgetting that the United States founded the organization and has led it since its creation in 1949. He has also said he is not asking but ordering seven countries to help. He did not specify which ones. “I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory because it is their territory,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on the way from Florida to Washington. “It’s the place from which they get their energy.” Actually it isn’t their territory, and it’s his fault that their energy is blocked.But in Trump’s mind, these threats are justified: He has a problem right now, so he wants other countries to solve it. He doesn’t seem to remember or care what he said to their leaders last month or last year, nor does he know how his previous decisions shaped public opinion in their countries or harmed their interests. But they remember, they care, and they know.Specifically, they remember that for 14 months, the American president has tariffed them, mocked their security concerns, and repeatedly insulted them. As long ago as January 2020, Trump told several European officials that “if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and to support you.” In February 2025, he told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he had no right to expect support either, because “you don’t have any cards.” Trump ridiculed Canada as the “51st state” and referred to both the present and previous Canadian prime ministers as “governor.” He claimed, incorrectly, that allied troops in Afghanistan “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines,” causing huge offense to the families of soldiers who died fighting after NATO invoked Article 5 of the organization’s treaty, on behalf of the United States, the only time it has done so. He called the British “our once-great ally,” after they refused to participate in the initial assault on Iran; when they discussed sending some aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf conflict earlier this month, he ridiculed the idea on social media: “We don’t need people that join Wars after ​we’ve already won!

Paloma Marín-Arraiza: This is a cross-post from the ORCID blog.If you missed our recent deep-dive with DataCite during International Love Data Week, don’t worry! We’ve got the highlights for you.In an era where Open Science and new ways of research assessment encourage researchers to share outputs beyond textual publications, the way they connect these outputs matters more than ever. Elevating your Research’s Impact and Visibility with ORCID and DataCite focused on making researchers’ professional lives easier and helping them achieve a higher impact from their outputs.The big takeawaysThe “Set It and Forget It” workflowIf you’ve ever dreamed of a self-updating CV, you can make it a reality using DataCite-ORCID auto-update functionality. When you use your ORCID iD during a data submission via a DataCite member repository and grant permissions to DataCite in DataCite Profiles, that work can automatically appear on your ORCID record. This means you can spend less time on manual entry and more time on actual research.Credit for everything, not just articlesDataCite DOIs allow you to get formal recognition, among others, for:Unique datasetsCustom software and codeImages, posters, and even physical samplesBy linking these to your ORCID iD, you create a “PID Graph”—a digital map that shows the full scope of your contribution to science.For a deeper dive, watch the recording and download the slides: 1. Importing Data From Other Systems; 2. Set-Up the ORCID Auto-Update; 3. Seeing your data’s impact: persistent identifiers in use.In the recording, you’ll get a visual breakdown of how a single DOI can trigger a chain reaction of discovery across global databases, as well as a walk-through of the specific settings you need to toggle to ensure your data and your profile are connected. To quickly set up your DataCite auto-updates, visit our documentation in the ORCID Knowledge Base.For more from International Love Data Week, read our blog, A Day in the Life of ORCID Data, which tracks the hypothetical journey of a researcher’s ORCID record data.The post ORCID and DataCite Supercharge Your Research Visibility appeared first on DataCite.

Andreas Brandtner: Andreas Brandtner reviews Ulrich Johannes Schneider’s essay on the birth of the modern library from 1850 to 1920. Schneider traces how libraries shifted from mere book repositories to reader-centered spaces, shaped by hygiene debates, new technologies, and urban industrial conditions. Case studies like the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, the British Museum Reading Room, and the Boston Public Library illustrate libraries as refuges for “free breathing” and critical thought, yet also as institutions of discipline, regulation, and social exclusion. The study links historical reading rooms to today’s digitally supported library spaces, highlighting their emancipatory potential and persistent inequalities.

Wolfgang Schmitz: Wolfgang Schmitz reviews Patricia F. Blume’s 772-page dissertation on the history of the Leipzig Book Fair in the GDR. Based on extensive archives, press sources and interviews, the study reconstructs five phases from 1945 to post-1990 transformation, showing the fair as a nodal point of book trade, cultural policy, censorship and German–German relations. Schmitz emphasizes its analysis of the fair’s dual economic and symbolic roles, the pervasive influence of the SED and the Stasi, conflicts with Frankfurt, and the fair’s function as a semi-open space for readers. He praises its clarity, rich documentation and lasting significance.

Jonathan Chait: Updated at 7:52 p.m. ET on March 5, 2026Kristi Noem’s autobiography includes the harrowing story of her decision to put down her dog, Cricket. The ill-fated pet had first ruined a hunting foray by going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life,” and went on to kill several chickens belonging to a neighbor. Noem then decided she had to shoot Cricket. “It was not a pleasant job,” she recounts, “but it had to be done.”After Noem’s latest public-relations fiasco, a shambolic session before Congress this week, President Trump found himself facing a similarly difficult choice.As homeland-security secretary, Noem personally generated more scandals over the past year than a normal presidency would muster in four. Her department approved $220 million in contracts for advertisements that feature herself warning illegal immigrants that they face deportation. One contract went to a firm that has ties to Noem, and the company’s CEO is married to Noem’s former spokesperson.Not only did the secretary spend lavishly to promote herself as a ruthless law enforcer, but she also lived in high style. Her department leased a luxurious plane with a queen bed, a kitchen, four televisions, and a bar. The official explanation was that the vehicle “will serve dual missions—both as ICE deportation flights and for cabinet level travel,” a strange expenditure for a department that otherwise seems to delight in mistreating detainees.In her defense, Noem appears particularly sensitive to the discomfort of substandard air travel. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that a maintenance issue had forced Noem to switch planes, and when the pilot neglected to move her blanket to the new plane, he was fired on the spot, before being reinstated because there was nobody else available to fly her home.Even while spending DHS’s resources profligately, Noem subjected the rest of the department to ruinous parsimony. She sent a memo in June requiring that she personally approve any expense costing more than $100,000, a bottleneck that frustrated her underlings, causing the delay of more than 1,000 contracts and disaster-relief grants.[Read: Did Kristi Noem just doom her career?]Many of her difficulties stemmed from her relationship with Corey Lewandowski. Trump blocked Lewandowski, his former aide, from working as Noem’s chief of staff, in part over concerns that the two have maintained a romantic relationship—a claim they both deny. They are both married, but not to each other.Lewandowski evaded this ban by taking a role as a special government employee, limited by law to working no more than 130 days a year for the federal government. Axios reported that he evaded this limit by, among other methods, having DHS employees let him into the building so that he didn’t have to swipe his card. (The department disputes this.) In his supposedly part-time role, he acted as something like a co-head of the department. “Everything has to go through Corey,” a lobbyist who has worked with DHS told Ben Terris of New York magazine: “It’s all based on ‘You’re my buddy, or you’re not my buddy. You hired my friend, or you didn’t hire my friend.’ That place just runs that way.”At a House hearing yesterday, Noem declined repeatedly under oath to deny having a romantic relationship with her subordinate. “I am shocked that we’re going down and peddling tabloid garbage in this committee today,” she said angrily but nonresponsively. “I would tell you that he is a special government employee who works for the White House. There are thousands of them in the federal government.” The trouble is that of the thousands of special government employees, Lewandowski is apparently the most special.In all probability, Noem’s fatal error was not infidelity, incompetence, or self-enrichment. All of these are sins that Trump would likely understand. What reportedly killed her was pointing the finger at her boss.Senator John Kennedy, somewhat unexpectedly for a Republican from Louisiana, grilled Noem for having leaked to reporters that the adviser Stephen Miller gave her bad information that led her to accuse Alex Pretti of “domestic terrorism” after immigration agents working for her department shot and killed the Minnesota man. Responding to Kennedy, Noem attacked the story for using anonymous sources.Noem also said that Trump had approved her controversial ad campaign. Her statement reportedly annoyed the president so deeply that he contradicted it in public and began calling Republicans to discuss firing Noem.Whether Noem was telling the truth is beside the point. The president, trained by the mob lawyer Roy Cohn, famously avoids giving written orders and looks askance at lawyers who take notes during his meetings. To publicly implicate him in the chain of responsibility is to violate what seems to be the president’s most sacred principle.Cricket was shot for yapping uncontrollably, bungling the mission, and killing innocent bystanders. Noem’s misdeeds are very similar, but she will be treated more mercifully. Trump announced that he will install his deposed homeland-security secretary as “Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas”—a new and apparently vital position that had been coincidentally set to be announced this weekend.There is no better choice than Noem for the distinction of being the first Cabinet member to be removed from this administration. She was fired, as Trump might put it, like a dog.