iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I also think notes like 'my article is CC-BY but can't be used by AI' typically means not in the model and not in inference. Is that what researchers really want? I get the sentiment and people not wanting their content in models, but at the same time, do researchers realise the implications?

I'm much more concerned than I was about how easy it is to [potentially] influence answers & how much model responses rely on second reporting/blogs/press releases of content they can't access. Any errors in these esp if repeated across social media, appear in the response attributed to the source.

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But I think there might be some subtle things happening that need testing. e.g. I think there's research showing female researchers hedge their results more. I suspect general LLM's are far more sensitive to this than search engines & may select more confident papers. That loop could build over time

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It's something I am increasingly interested in. I was going to write something for @stmassoc.bsky.social's consultation on AI & research content but time pressured at the mo. I'm curious about what kinds of loops paper selection sets up over time. Experience tells me there is an OA/access bias.

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PubTech Radar @pubtechr.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

@metasynthesis.net Be interested to hear more about this. How general LLMs select and rank research content (inference) in their outputs needs a lot of study, I think. Whether the focus is bias, quality, relevance, geographic focus, OA advantage, closeness to existing search tools, etc.

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I agree. Where do you think we’ll be in a year? The future is agentic and you’re connecting into (often) subscription services from your central hub? The future is with specialist services, ‘one shot’, complexity is hidden and you go to your favourite service(s)? The future will be a patchwork? …

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PubTech Radar @pubtechr.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Having said that I think people/publishers disallowing use of their content for inference is going to become a very big deal.

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PubTech Radar @pubtechr.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

I also have a suspicion that if women use more hedged language in their papers, this will filter through into what LLMs select in answer engine mode. I doubt this is a problem right now bit in the future it might be.

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PubTech Radar @pubtechr.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Thinking about general models here. I used to think this effect probably existed, mirrored the real world, was small, & not a serious issue. I am starting to change my mind, especially in an agentic world/effects compounding over time.

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Helen King - Innovation Ideas @innovationideas.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

For example, reviewer invitations sent by journals via ScholarOne rose from 9M in 2018 to nearly 21.5M in 2025 (some caveats around that stat in the report). Despite working in academic publishing for years and understanding the scale, I still find the size of numbers like this staggering.

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Helen King - Innovation Ideas @innovationideas.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

The ScholarOne Future of Peer Review 2026 report is out. I'm one of the interviewees, which gives me a vested interest in flagging it, but it does contain some interesting data. www.silverchair.com/news/future-...

silverchair.com

REPORT: 2026 Future of Peer Review - Silverchair

The second annual report on trends and transformation brings a comprehensive analysis to what's working and what isn't in peer review.

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PubTech Radar @pubtechr.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

New issue of PubTech Radar: pubtechradar.substack.com/p/pubtech-ra.... Fabricated citations, the AI detection delusion, 35 novels about research integrity, and more...

pubtechradar.substack.com

PubTech Radar Scan: Issue 42

Usual mix of academic publishing tech news, launches, AI developments, and longer reads.

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PubTech Radar @pubtechr.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

All the time! Real DOI but attached to wrong citation, real citation fake DOI that goes to 404, fake citation with fake DOI, fake citation with real DOI to a real paper… mostly real citation with incorrect fake or incorrect real DOI (often a paper similar to citation).

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PubTech Radar @pubtechr.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Agree. It's also a sign of how much publishing/QA has changed. 20+ years ago, there were teams of people in 'Electronic Production' manually checking every URL in the references. That would have followed checks in other departments + typesetters fixes. (We def shouldn't go back to that though)

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PubTech Radar @pubtechr.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Lots of tools, like GroundedAI, can help but I think this is far from a solved problem unless you build checking steps or use a specialist model/tool. Even then those checking & validation steps, may not work that well if done in a simplistic way such as just asking the model to check refs.

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PubTech Radar @pubtechr.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Not sure that about this. Logically you would think so but my sense is some of the newer mainstream models aren’t improving in this area. Especially if you specifically ask for a reference to support X, v hit and miss what you’ll get - dois are often incorrect even if reference right.

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PubTech Radar @pubtechr.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

Small rant. What on earth has happened to #ChatGPT? Conversation with 9 straightforward questions, 8 incorrect & 1 partially correct answer. 7 links to supposedly verified sources (after problems in the previous round of conversation) - all hallucinated. Every conversation I have seems problematic ☹️

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It was utterly fascinating to get screenshots of some student project work that I was loosely involved with. I didn't recognise any of the (not uni-provided) tech platforms being used. At one point, it seemed everyone had Kimi on their phones (atypical group though & prob just latest trend).

I agree, I doubt many think that way. My interaction with students is incredibly limited, but the few I do interact with are typically tech-related Chinese students at UK Unis who are 100% embedded in Chinese tech.

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Gosh, I am full of the joys of spring today 😉. I went to the talk posted ‪by @eve.gd ‬ (bsky.app/profile/eve....), and I'm still pondering where we might end up - there definitely aren't enough diverse voices developing this tech.

Bit of an aside, but I can also imagine staff whose teaching effectiveness gets quietly assessed through evidence of what students are asking in their AI. (There are IT systems rather than library systems afterall).

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There's also a safeguarding angle – what's a university's responsibility if a student becomes harmfully overdependent on an AI system it endorses, and I assume monitors? Assume there will be a cohort that will embrace, and an equal cohort challenged by monitoring

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Given your AI history, personalisation & projects aren't particularly portable, do you put a lot of work into a system you can't take with you when you leave? I've been part of some interesting business discussions about who owns this work & how much, if anything, you can take with you to a new job

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Non-university AI seems sensible to me, except for 100% legit academic work. I suspect we'll see some horror stories about students being flagged for 'non-compliant' academic use under policies they've never read, and possibly retrospective log-trawling to prove a case.

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PubTech Radar @pubtechr.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

It's an interesting post. I wasn't sure if the argument was that students are stopping using AI, or switching to non-university AI, or some combination of both happening, but to different groups.

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Both I think - definitely Windows. It’s an excel add-in. I have no real use for it so was just playing around.

PubTech Radar @pubtechr.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Have you tried the (beta) Claude plugin for excel yet? Wondering if it’s me or problems at Claude’s end but it’s been really shockingly bad on simple tasks like a draw graph and some calculations - supports all the AI naysayer’s worst fears about hallucinations.

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PubTech Radar @pubtechr.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

I'm a beginner NotebookLM user, but as a person doing basic research tasks with a set of docs, it's incredibly useful & I would have loved it as a student. It's not perfect; more carefully worded questions give better results, and yes, image outputs can be riddled with errors, but still very useful.

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PubTech Radar @pubtechr.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

I read this article and had questions about the framing/accuracy of a couple of points. I haven't commented & don't feel fully confident responding, as I'm not an expert in technical details. A bit hypocritical, I know, but I'd want someone to do the same for my posts when I get things wrong.

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Martijn Roelandse @martijnroelandse.dev · 11/02/2026

I’m working on a small, experimental tool that creates narrative, multi-signal overviews for scholarly books (citations, usage, attention). Looking for a few (university) presses (and others) to test an MVP and give candid feedback. Open data. No black boxes. DM me. #scholarlypublishing #books

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Helen King - Innovation Ideas @innovationideas.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

Please fill out my AI usage survey if you work in publishing. Which models are you using? How often? What's delivering value? Takes under 5 minutes. Contributors get early access to results before I share them more widely towards the end of the month: ai-and-me.innovationideas.co.uk

AI & Me - a snapshot of how people in publishing are using AI right now.

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PubTech Radar @pubtechr.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

This is a strange book. Lots of interesting points, but I didn't get the conflation of LLM AI with all uses of AI. Lots of good uses of machine learning. AI is bad was overdone, and I think it weakened their arguments. If 50+% of US adults are using LLMs, it's hard to argue they aren't useful.

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PubTech Radar @pubtechr.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

Love this demo of Crixet (now Prism). For all the talk of robotic labs and AI accelerating science, the reality is Victor Powell, the developer, in his kitchen, minding the baby (the high-value work), while talking to an AI tool to handle the writing: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce-S...

youtube.com

Crixet Voice Mode

YouTube video by Victor Powell

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PubTech Radar @pubtechr.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

I think you're being a bit harsh on yourself! There's a world of difference between someone with genuine expertise sharing knowledge and the AI Grifter crowd.

PubTech Radar @pubtechr.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

I love these! I think I'm probably closest to The Tool Magpie - though hopefully the more discerning end of the spectrum :-)

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PubTech Radar @pubtechr.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

🚨 New issue of PubTech Radar is out: lnkd.in/eaCsVfja

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Anna Aslanyan @anna-aslanyan.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

British Library staff asked for a decent pay. Instead they got ‘a few money-saving present ideas’, such as ‘consider not giving presents this holiday season’. They are on strike this week. I wrote about it for @lrb.co.uk. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

lrb.co.uk

Anna Aslanyan | On the Picket Line

On Monday morning, more than a hundred people formed a picket line outside one of the entrances to the British Library...

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PubTech Radar @pubtechr.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

From Pietro Schirano (@skirano) on X writing about Nano Banana Pro: "Here’s my favorite use case so far: take papers or really long articles and turn them into a detailed whiteboard photo." How to video: x.com/skirano/stat...

Photo of an AI-generated white board about the LLama 3 herd of models paper