How can you tell science on this planet is fucked? When the Vatikan is the only place where science is defended:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01966-4

"A more vocal “statement of concern” was issued last week by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Vatican City"

Silence from, e.g.:
InterAcademy Partnership
World Academy of Sciences
International Science Council

Shame on these organizations and all others who fail to defend science!

#science #academia #academicchatter #academies

11/ A recently added piece of my tracking project is this Google doc of public statements supporting research and higher education against threats from the Trump administration.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Y5_fjGPNh4_1Hgc0Q68Hr2vJhVIOK1Qc-KynfIG6fZI/edit?tab=t.0

It includes a list of other projects tracking Trump admin actions the same topics.

Please suggest any statements or projects that belong in the doc.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeYUnm41fWHH75OQKbvDf7OA-fK3tgZr5h5tnuBKTPZ-CUEWw/viewform

#Academia#Censorship#DefendResearch#Takedowns #Trump #TrumpVResearch#USPol#USPolitics
@academicchatter

Deeply disappointed to learn "dark academia" stands for combat training and high school feuds, instead of using forbidden magic to convert your citations into a more arcane format to avoid being cursed by your professor, or finding out Reviewer No. 2 is actually an eldritch being hiding in the basement.

#books #bookstodon #academia

Now this comes at just the right time!

"The handbook considers tools for enhancing digital safety and highlights the importance of ongoing documentation, preserving imperiled data, and creating distributed archives as a defense against erasure. It also calls on scholars to tell their stories—publicly or anonymously—to inspire others, maintain accountability and preserve a historical record."

https://zenodo.org/records/15696097

#academicchatter #academia#USpol #politics

🌱 Grow commons. Want to help free #academia from corporate #enshittification?

Note the call for action in the previous post. Delightful #OpenScience is looking for dedicated gardeners (maintainers) who work with such tools themself and thus able to bring the necessary quality and rigour that is required for the #scientific process.

Boosts are appreciated.

Please open an issue if you can offer help:

https://codeberg.org/teaserbot-labs/delightful-open-science

@bonfire @scifed

#science #academics #research

If you want to help people in #academia who are maybe less fortunate than you, who have less famous supervisors, or work at less prestigious universities, here's one simple thing you can do:

Do proper literature research.

That means complete forward and backward snowballing from a decent seed set. Find everything that is relevant to your paper and cite it. Budget a couple of full days for it.

"We analyse the migration of 300,000 academic users from Twitter/X to Bluesky between 2023 and early 2025, combining rich bibliometric data, longitudinal social-media activity, and a novel cross-platform identity-matching pipeline. We show that 18% of scholars in our sample transitioned, with transition rates varying sharply by discipline, political expression, and Twitter engagement but not by traditional academic metrics. Using time-varying Cox models and a matched-pairs design, we isolate genuine peer influence from homophily. We uncover a striking asymmetry whereby information sources drive migration far more powerfully than audience, with this influence decaying exponentially within a week. We further develop an ego-level contagion classifier, revealing that simple contagion drives two-thirds of all exits, shock-driven bursts account for 16%, and complex contagion plays a marginal role. Finally, we show that scholars who rebuild a higher fraction of their former Twitter networks on Bluesky remain significantly more active and engaged. Our findings provide new insights onto theories of network externalities, directional influence, and platform migration, highlighting information sources’ central role in overcoming switching costs."

https://arxiv.org/html/2505.24801v1

#SocialMedia#SocialNetworks#Twitter#Bluesky#Academia#Universities#HigherEd

📢Symposium on 25-9: #Academia at the #digital crossroads. Opportunities, risks, and #AcademicFreedom in the age of #BigTech & #AI

🔗https://www.rug.nl/library/calendar/250925-academia-at-the-digital-crossroads

Opening: @universityofgroningen Rector Jacquelien Scherpen

Lectures: Tamar Sharon & Juliette Schaafsma

Panel w/ Michiel Kolman (Elsevier)
@FleurZeldenrust (Young Academy NL)
David Cheruiyot ( @YAGroningen)
Nolda Tipping-Griffioen ( @CIT_RUG)
Marijke Folgering ( @Bibliothecaris)
Host: Titus Stahl @tstahl

#OpenScience#DigitalSovereignty

Excellent: "More than 100 institutions and funders worldwide have confirmed that research published in #eLife continues to be considered in hiring, promotion, and funding decisions, following the journal’s bold move to forgo its Journal Impact Factor."
https://elifesciences.org/for-the-press/bf74b86e/more-than-100-institutions-and-funders-confirm-recognition-of-elife-papers-signalling-support-for-open-science

PS: This is not just a step to support eLife, but a step to break the stranglehold of bad metrics in research assessment. For the same reason, it's a step toward more honest and less simplistic assessment.

#Academia#Assessment#JIF#Metrics#Universities
@academicchatter

So glad to be joining social.coop. I study and teach state theories, revolutions, social movements, communes, and collectives.

But, for what matters here, I am seeking to learn new practices, approaches, and methods of living in the shadow of the increasingly repressive, centralising, and homogenising modern state.

#introduction #academia #research