Tim Elfenbein

Tim Elfenbein

@timelfen.bsky.social

Principal of Forthcoming LLC, a publishing consultancy; Member of @limnpress.bsky.social editorial collective; Researcher & practitioner of scholarly publishing; Digital explorer–analog sailor; Victim of meaning.

1.6K followers1.2K following4.2K posts

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To all the folks in scholarly communication/publishing/open science out there: 1. I appreciate the work you do. 2. I likely have significant differences w/ you or your organization over strategic direction, stakeholder orientation, ideals for the future, etc., etc. 3. I appreciate the work you do.

The boat has sat at a mooring ball in Galesville for the past month while I loaded her up w/ gear & crawled all over her trying to make sense of all the systems. Today is the day I finally move her. I’m sailing down the Chesapeake toward the Potomac, where, if all goes well, we’ll anchor tonight.

Lessons learned so far during my 1st singlehanded trip on the boat: check the brightness of the chart plotter *before* shoving off, so you can better navigate a path through the dangers you experience leaving an anchorage; always, no matter the sea state, put your coffee cup in a drink holder.

Tim Elfenbein reposted

1/x OK, A little thread about wind force on ships. Can the bow thruster hold this ship against the wind, or does she need tugs? Some ships are like a big wall (cruise ships, container ships PCTC). Here is the rule-of-thumb arithmetic behind that call. #shiphandling

Tim Elfenbein reposted

COSTS & FUNDING: Read our deep dive into the finances of #OpenAccess book publishing, with a review of our costs and revenues from the last financial year and a comparison with six years ago. What's changed? buff.ly/xDf5s3K #OAWeek #OpenAccessWeek #OAbooks #OA

buff.lyThe cost of open access books: six years onIn 2020, we had published over 170 titles, at a rate of between 24–30 books per year. Now we are approaching our 500th publication and we publish between 55–70 books per year: a more than 100%…

Tim Elfenbein reposted

Knowledge production, publishing, and research dissemination are part of the same whole. And we should work on drawing them closer together.

Tim Elfenbein reposted

JOB(S): My dept has an open rank open specialties (w/in Information Science / Library & Archival Science & closely related) search out of which we hope to make multiple hires! Im not on the committee but can say we'll have new teaching needs in social impacts of information technology & also ethics!

jobs.wisc.eduAssistant / Associate / Full Professor  - Madison, Wisconsin, United StatesCurrent Employees: If you are currently employed at any of the Universities of Wisconsin, log in to Workday to apply through the internal application process.Job Category:FacultyEmployment Type:Regula...

Tim Elfenbein reposted

For #OAweek, our Executive Director Professor Caroline Edwards (@theblochian.bsky.social) spoke to SPARC about the @ojcollective.bsky.social, inspired by the Open Library of Humanities, and what motivates her to challenge academic publishing cultures. Read the interview 👇

SPARC@sparcopen.bsky.social

The mission of the Open Journals Collective is to build a sustainable future for academic journals by challenging the profit-making models of global corporate publishing & data systems. Hear more from Executive Director Caroline Edwards in our #OAWeek profile: www.openaccessweek.org/theme-profil...

Tim Elfenbein reposted

Lots to think about in this post by @kjsanders.eurosky.social on what 'open access publishing' is and how it is developing. Is the goal simply to have more "outputs" (ugh) be available openly, or does it matter how we get there?

Copim@copim.bsky.social

What is the cost of knowledge? Find out what this year's #OAWeek theme means to #CopimCommunity The next set of interviews are live, head to our website to find out more! 👉 buff.ly/MFjSSdu @kjsanders.eurosky.social @openbookcollective.bsky.social

Tim Elfenbein reposted

We are sorry to learn of the death of Duke Professor Ara Wilson, who served on our Editorial Advisory Board and who had a chapters in "Unsettling Queer Anthropology" and "Asian Biotech." Our thoughts are with her family, colleagues, and students. buff.ly/IsLOsxJ

Tim Elfenbein reposted

While seeing all the posts from the #4S meeting made me quite nostalgic for academic conferences & getting to geek out w/ fellow scholars over their latest projects, thankfully I’m attending the Annapolis Boat Show this week, where I get to geek out w/ fellow sailors over the latest boats & gear.

Tim Elfenbein reposted

In response to the government’s renaming of AI to SI, I propose all journals rename Supplemental Information to Additional Information.

Tim Elfenbein reposted

My wife likes to call me swarthy (I’m slightly darker skinned than her, likely because my ancestors ate mainly beats while hers cabbage), but she keeps getting it mixed up with smarmy. I’ve played out the different definitions for her several times, but she doesn’t seem to want to learn.

Did the rig survey today. Only one surprise—which isn’t terrible given the kind of surprises that can happen—is that we have a wasp nest somewhere in the mast.

Tim Elfenbein reposted

I am absolutely delighted to announce that the open access version of "In Referees We Trust? How Peer Review Became a Mark of Scientific Legitimacy" is now live! Want to know more about how scholars' lives came to be ruled by Reviewer 2? Download the book FREE at: direct.mit.edu/books/monogr...

More knowledge artifacts as I dig through the big bag of manuals on the boat. A crumpled up piece of paper with the diagram of part of the electrical system. The boat no longer has a generator onboard, so I’m going to say this is out of date.

And this, printed around the time the first owner took possession of this French built Catamaran in 2016. About 75% of the equipment and wiring labels on the boat are still in French. Merde.

Tim Elfenbein reposted

Replying to @adambecker.bsky.social

Intelligence is not a universal solvent. It doesn't fix everything. The people pushing these ideas only believe this is true because they desperately want it to be true. They want the world to be much, much simpler than it actually is. But we live in a complicated world, and that's a good thing.

Tim Elfenbein reposted

2+ years later, I am still a little perplexed that r(eplicability)-hacking by high-profile names has not created even a tenth of the outrage or pushback that any given p-hacking case regularly does, despite all the evidence. it says a lot about not what we care about but why.

Andrew Gelman et al.@statmodeling.bsky.social

What’s the story behind that paper by the Center for Open Science team that just got retracted? statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/09/26/w...

Tim Elfenbein reposted

authors, y'all know that production/project editors do not read your manuscripts line by line, right? I mention this in a spirit of sincerity. I wouldn't expect an author to have this knowledge unless they were already very familiar with the publishing process.

Tim Elfenbein reposted

I'm very excited and honored to be part of this seminar series! I'll be talking about the vulnerability of social infrastructure within the knowledge ecosystem. Please consider registering!

We are very happy to share with you our schedule of events for the Michaelmas term! Find out more by clicking on the 'Programme' tab at www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/research/networks/future-of-open-knowledge/ Our first event with @lschiff.bsky.social at @defendresearch.bsky.social is coming up 15th October

Ben is freely speculating far beyond anything announced in this partnership btwn an AI company & a group of publishers. The AI agents are already crawling the literature: this initiative is directed at addressing issues like attribution/citation & business models for publisher compensation.

Ben Williamson@benpatrickwill.bsky.social

A new startup plans to set AI agents loose in academic publications. Editing or reviewing for a journal could ultimately be about responding to the demand to curate high quality academic content for AI agents to crawl and collect valuable knowledge tokens. www.redpine.ai/insights/pub...

It would be really be useful for commentators to contemplate when/where this service would be useful & harmful. The decomposition of articles & extraction of vetted bits comports w/ some approaches to knowledge but not others. Where is this useful & where fatal to the way knowledge is made?

I regularly critique schol comm initiatives that universalize a particular approach to knowledge to build infrastructure that is supposedly applicable to all. But what follows is that I can’t mistakenly universalize my own humanistic approach when evaluating schol comm targeted to other knowledges.

Tim Elfenbein reposted

We are very pleased to open our first public call for Expressions of Interest for individual journals to join OJC! Are you a publisher or journal team with a specific journal that you'd like to nominate to join the OJC collection? Apply by Oct 30th! www.openjournalscollective.org/news/express...

openjournalscollective.orgExpressions of interest now open for individual journals to join the Open Journals Collective — Open Journals Collective

Tim Elfenbein reposted

Love to see this but man the Story of the Walkman was an Open University textbook written towards the end of Stuart’s 18 year tenure there. He taught 10000s of OU students & that seems kind of airbrushed out of his legacy www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

theguardian.comThatcherism via the Walkman: Stuart Hall’s British cultural studies preserved onlineProject lead says it celebrates ‘incredible contributions’ Jamaica-born sociologist made to Britain’s culture