iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ross Mounce @rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/08/2026

Re-reading the Anna’s Archive analysis of WorldCat data to determine which books are “rare” (only a single copy held in just one library) annas-archive.gl/blog/worldcat-edit… 4.72 milllion (59% of 8million) are tier 1 rare.

annas-archive.gl

Worldcat editions and holdings release

Another step towards a TODO list of rare books.

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Ross Mounce @rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/08/2026

Anyone here have good knowledge of how legal deposit _actually_ works in the United States? I'm a little alarmed to read this HN comment: "The Library of Congress only selects around half of published books to be permanently held." [Is that true?] news.ycombinator.com/item?id=493842… […]

Ross Mounce @rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2026

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me: define the word 'stationary' (for my daughter) Google AI overview: Stationery is a noun that means writing materials. This includes paper, envelopes, pens, pencils, and notebooks. Always interesting to see examples in which LLMs fail at really simple tasks.

define: stationary
AlOverview
(+) stationery
/'sterfon(a)ri/
Stationery is a noun that means writing materials. This includes paper, envelopes, pens,
pencils, and notebooks. @ Cambridge Dictionary +1
Common Types
« Writing paper and matching envelopes
+ Notebooks and notepads
« Pens, pencils, and markers
« Business letterheads and cards @ Cambridge Dictionary +3

Ross Mounce @rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/08/2026

Papers and journals originally published by Pensoft now appearing on Elsevier’s ScienceDirect platform eg At ScienceDirect: www.sciencedirect.com/org/science/a… At Pensoft (original): natureconservation.pensoft.net/arti… Is there a press […]

Ross Mounce @rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

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I'm not feeling very tech-savvy today... Could anyone help me get around Imgur's block of users in the UK? I'm seeking access to a GIF of a book spine being cut off: imgur.com/gallery/book-spine-cutter… If you're outside of the UK you can just click on […]

Ross Mounce @rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026

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Really weirded out by this sudden wave of scholarly publishing industry posts about 'trust' and 'trust signals'. Trust is really really the wrong word here. The publishers _want_ you to blindly trust everything they publish... so naturally they are talking about trust a lot. What we actually […]

Bjørn Sætrevik @satrevik.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026

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Reposted by Ross Mounce

Uh-oh: I just got an email saying that @CenterforOpenScience will be phasing out the "project workflow" of the #OpenScienceFramework (it will remain as a site for planning #preregistration). Using this as a repository for files, code, results and tools has been a major part of my research […]

fediscience.org

Original post on fediscience.org

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Ross Mounce @rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/08/2026

The STM Publishing News website appears to have been hacked. I'm seeing lots of clearly injected spam/advertising. See e.g. this journal transfer post with lots of added injected statements like "The lawyers from www.phillipslawoffices.com/traumatic-brain-injury/ are the best to deal with […]

Ross Mounce @rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/08/2026

There are definitely benefits to being a smaller sized university press publisher... For example when @lsepress.bsky.social puts out a book I actually pay attention to it a) it's open access so I can actually read it b) they're not publishing a flood of […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Cover image for the new open access book: "Geography and a Geographer: Reimagining the Discipline After Ron Johnston"
Part of the RGS-IBG Book Series series. The cover is mostly black and white featuring an image of Prof Johnston surrounded by books and papers.

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Ross Mounce @rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026

Cool to see Arcadia up there in the $5million PLUS bracket, awarded to the Wikimedia Endowment wikimediaendowment.org

Breakdown of the highest levels of financial contributors to the Wikimedia Endowment

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Ross Mounce @rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/07/2026

Headline text: "Transformative agreements move to the centre of library strategy, report finds" ... small text near the bottom... "The research was funded through a contribution from Wiley." 🚮 […]

Ross Mounce @rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/07/2026

Miserably hot here in my part of London. The temperature will go _down_ to 27C at 11pm tonight. By midnight it might even go down to 25C. Tooooo hotttt 🥵

Martin Paul Eve @mpe.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/07/2026

Reposted by Ross Mounce

RANT AHEAD I am miffed. We had a submission at Orbit that we went to great pains to review. It was extremely challenging to find readers. Our internal team read it, too. It was through to acceptance. And then the author pulled out because their university demanded a Q1 or Q2 ranked journal. I […]

hcommons.social

Original post on hcommons.social

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Martin Paul Eve @mpe.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/07/2026

I love to start my day with a bit of heart-stopping technical work. Ha! But Knowledge Commons Sites and Groups are now operating on WordPress 7.0. That sounds trivial, but with tens of thousands of Sites and users, we can't mess up on a big upgrade like […] [Original post on hcommons.social]

The homepage of Knowledge Commons. Website hero graphic with an abstract green, cream, and teal overlapping-leaf background. Large white rounded panels overlay the design. The main headline reads: “Resist enclosure. Join the Commons.” with “enclosure” and “Commons” in rust red. Above it, a pale green pill with a globe icon reads: “Open access, open source, open to all.” A smaller white panel below says: “Knowledge Commons hosts a growing coalition of open knowledge creators across the disciplines and around the world. Discover, connect, and share in a community that believes knowledge should be free.” Three dark green buttons read: “Create an Account,” “Explore Works,” and “Become a Champion.” On the right, a raised white donation card with a thin red left border reads: “Support the Commons. Help us keep scholarly resources free and accessible to everyone. Your contribution sustains a community-owned platform that resists commercialization of academic work.” A red button says: “Contribute Now.”

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2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple.dmv.community.ap.brid.gy · 06/07/2026

🔒 A 19-year-old cybercriminal was caught despite using a VPN across multiple countries - because Windows has a tracking number built into every install that a VPN can't hide. Peter Stokes, arrested in Finland in April and extradited to the US last week, is tied to Scattered Spider, the hacking […]

dmv.community

Original post on dmv.community

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Stephen Borrill @sborrill.justfollow.me.uk.ap.brid.gy · 06/07/2026

CAMRA's new report on the state of beer, brewing and hospitality in the UK is essential reading; not just for beer drinkers, but consumers in general as well as critics of globalisation camra.org.uk/beer-report #RealAle #CAMRA

camra.org.uk

CAMRA | Beer in the UK — a CAMRA consumer report

The UK brewing industry has been quietly taken over. A consumer-focused report from CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale.

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Bianca Kramer @msphelps.akademienl.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/07/2026

Can we afford the future? Last week at #LIBER202, @cameronneylon and I presented out open source analytics pipeline projecting library consortium costs into the future under different scenarios. Using data from #CAUL and #Bibsam we show how publicly […] [Original post on akademienl.social]

Stacked bar chart showing overlap of detection of affiliated publications for CAUL institutions from 2015 to 2024. A substantial proportion of outputs are identified as affiliated in both OpenAlex and OpenAIRE with both contributing a proportion of unique outputs.

Stacked area graph showing a projection of publishing systems costs over time. Overall costs rise from around 80 million to about 160 million euros from 2024 to 2032. The model scenario, built up from past data for Bibsam, focuses on expansion of publishing agreements to reduce APC payments so shows an increasing proportion of agreement costs over time.

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Ross Mounce @rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/06/2026

peak dystopia: "As an example, the most expensive agreement for Karolinska Institutet was with Elsevier, which constituted 46% of the total journal budget" 😱😱😱 Bibliodiversity? Nah, we'll just support Elsevier. insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/…

insights.uksg.org

It’s all about the money: financial aspects of transformative agreements and their impact on two university libraries in Sweden | Insights

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Ross Mounce @rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/06/2026

Exciting to see LA Referencia do semantic search: "Search in your language. Discover research across languages." (with a friendly reminder that semantic search leverages AI techniques including NLP, ML, and embeddings...) la-referencia-ioi.github.io/larefer… […]

Digital Preservation Coalition @dpc-chat.digipres.club.ap.brid.gy · 22/06/2026

Reposted by Ross Mounce

🎉 New and freely available today: the Preserving E-Theses Resource Pack! Created by the DPC as part of the Arcadia and Research England-funded Open Book Futures project, the Pack offers practical guidance, videos, and resources to help universities and […] [Original post on digipres.club]

two PhD students working on their theses in a library

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Ross Mounce @rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/06/2026

I didn't even know the phrase 'Low-Altitude Economy' existed, nor did I immediately understand what it would be (it's about drones) but I see MDPI already has a journal dedicated to it!!! Ahead of the curve there MDPI, kudos 🙃 www.mdpi.com/journal/lae

Dave Keating @davekeating.substack.com · 16/06/2026

Reposted by Ross Mounce

With the US government's ban on foreigners using certain applications of a private American company, the White House has confirmed Europe's worse fears. Trump can shut down the European economy by blocking access to the American services we use every day.

davekeating.substack.com

As Trump bans Europeans from using Anthropic, the EU's US dependence is painfully on display

The US government has ordered Anthropic to block non-Americans from accessing its latest AI models. Europe is running out of time to shield itself from the US kill switch.

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

The American Anthropological Association has put out a very clear statement in response to a new report claiming the humanities and social sciences are ruining themselves with left-wing bias. Would be good to see more such robust responses to these familiar yet deeply unhelpful accusations

The report also characterizes anthropology’s attention to positionality and reflexivity as evidence of a broader rejection of objectivity. This is wholly incorrect. Reflexivity is not, as the report asserts a claim that facts don’t exist, that they are irrelevant, or that all interpretations are equally valid. It is a methodological commitment to examining how knowledge is produced and to making visible the assumptions, relationships, and contexts that shape research. Far from weakening scholarly rigor, many anthropologists see reflexivity as one of the ways rigor is strengthened.

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Ross Mounce @rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/06/2026

Wow. Three red cards in the first game? Gonna be an interesting tournament!!!

Eric Kansa @ekansa.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/06/2026

Reposted by Ross Mounce

Ugh #Bots The #AI_bubble fuels annoying and costly extraction of #openaccess resources, including #opendata in #archaeology research. Open Context (opencontext.org) is now getting slammed with 3x more traffic than normal. The financial fallout of […] [Original post on scholar.social]

Graph of an ongoing spike in Open Context's traffic, likely driven by "AI" related bots

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Ross Mounce @rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/06/2026

RE: openbiblio.social/@ZBW_MediaTalk/11… alleged fraud with AI-generated musicology books published by a publisher(?) called "tredition" tredition.com tredition is a "self-publishing platform"

openbiblio.social

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Ross Mounce @rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/06/2026

Always worth re-reading the definiton of open access as set out by the Budapest Open Access Initiative back in 2001/2002: "By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link […]

Fabienne Gallaire @lignedescience.social.sciences.re.ap.brid.gy · 07/06/2026

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The Yellow Milkmaid Syndrome. "The Milkmaid’, one of Johannes Vermeer's most famous pieces, depicts a scene of a woman quietly pouring milk into a bowl. During a survey the Rijksmuseum discovered that there were over 10,000 copies of the image on the […] [Original post on social.sciences.re]

Two pictures of The Milkmaid painting.
the one on the right is very yellow (probably trying to make the colours blue and yellow pop more but ending up with a yeallowy wash on the whole background.)

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Ross Mounce @rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/06/2026

RE: mastodon.scot/@FaithfullJohn/116691… Poor publishing practice from such a wealthy corporate publisher (Wiley) It seems they've put the metadata online without actually making the fulltext available. Doh! (I presume it _will_ be openly licenced and open access once the […]

Djoerd Hiemstra 🍉 @djoerd.idf.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/06/2026

Reposted by Ross Mounce

OpenJournalsCollective.org is a collective of libraries, university presses, and non-profit publishers reshaping academic research by challenging the profit-making models of global corporate publishing and data systems.

openjournalscollective.org

Landing — Open Journals Collective

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Ross Mounce @rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/06/2026

Reading the Jisc Open Policy Finder annual review, which was published 19th March 2026. Total Expenditure: £605,827 Total Income: £411,835 So, a loss of £193,992 for the year? openpolicyfinder.jisc.ac.uk/Open-po…

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Martin Paul Eve @eve.gd · 27/05/2026

Big let down, to be honest

ijbol adjani ✅
@onbeinganangel

loved her work but this is really disappointing. i
hope she can clear this up

Benji @WrnrWrites [redacted]

To confirm, this “100% AI generated” passage is the
opening of chapter 5 from Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein

Your Text is AI/GPT Generated

100%
AI GPT*

It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that
almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of
being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered
dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-
extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive

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Reposted by Ross Mounce

Dr. Serge Zaka @sergezaka.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Le record national de chaleur de mai a été dépassé/égalé avec une facilité déconcertante par 24 stations. Depuis le 22 mai, 1364 records de chaleur ont été battus. Du jamais vu. Le nouveau record national sera surement la station de Perpignan (37.4°C). Attendons l'expertise de Météo-France.

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Ross Mounce @rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/05/2026

Really enjoying the AI-Bridges Symposium (I'm attending virtually, from the Arcadia office in other part of London). Exciting to be playing with the Wikidata MCP. Probably my first time actually consciously using MCP. Curiously it hits the exact use case I have for LLMs -> generating better […]

Terence Eden @edent.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/05/2026

130

Reposted by Ross Mounce

Here's the response to my #FoI request www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/info… There are no minutes of any meeting where this new anti-open-source guidance was discussed. Lends credence to the suggestion that a […]

Ross Mounce @rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/05/2026

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wild. Is the UK the new enemy of the USA? QUOTE: "" The letter says that the suspension of her grant was due to undisclosed funding from the United Kingdom, which has baffled her: “I cannot recall any funding that I’ve ever had from the UK,” she says. "" […]