@Br3nda visitors are shocked at NZ food prices

@heroicendeavour Thank you for sharing. I was particular struck by this sentence: "Although OA was meant to provide free and unrestricted access to
research, publishers have found a new revenue stream by equating OA with APCs, thereby creating an economic barrier"

Elsevier is a subsidiary of RELX, a leading data broker and risk surveillance firm that sells to law enforcement and govt agencies.

In this light, this new report examines in detail how Elsevier's ScienceDirect website shares personal data with third parties. It documents data practices that "directly conflict with library privacy standards" and raises questions about the potential for data collected from academic products to be used in RELX's risk surveillance products:
https://sparcopen.org/news/2023/sparc-report-urges-action-to-address-concerns-with-sciencedirect-data-privacy-practices/

@DonnaLanclos tempting

Periodic reminder of why the taxpayer argument for OA ain't great:

* it encourages nationalism in research. "Why should non-taxpayers from elsewhere get access?"
* not everyone in every country pays taxes anyway
* lots of research is not taxpayer funded

Yup, that's what "transformative agreements" look like:

“We run a substantial risk of getting stuck in a perpetual transformation that also contributes to increasing costs."
https://www.su.se/english/news/open-access-need-to-move-away-from-transformative-agreements-1.683787

#openaccess

I and other colleagues at Middlesex University were interviewed for this HEPI post on the impact of generative AI
https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2023/10/17/the-impact-of-generative-ai-exploring-challenges-and-opportunities-at-middlesex-university/

@Br3nda when I visited NZ was shocked by cost of food, in season, produced locally

Playing with AI offering from one of our resource providers. At an early level and can see what improvements might make this more useful, and also considering how we talk about these with students and suggest use cases.#AI

@mike fair, though technically LLMs include things like BERT (encoder models) which has been used in regular Google since 2019 for ranking search results but I take your point to mean generative LLM (decoder or encoder -decoder models). Will be harder and harder to avoid such thing I suspect as time goes on

@heroicendeavour this looks and sounds delicious

@heroicendeavour indeed and must be extremely disappointing for library workers in Dubai and region who were working on this

Advent calendar, but with painkillers rather than chicolates, make-up, or gin

@Lawrie thanks, very useful questions as we approach all the how we're using AI for good marketing

Celebrating 21 years since meeting the man who would become my cohabitant, civil partnership, joint mortgage/homeowner, co-parent, and generally nice to be with person.

@brynolf I have to say the advert is a little off putting

So often the answer to "what do students need" is "time, and money." Rinse and repeat. #ALTC23