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Academia

How the academic system actually works — incentives, careers, funding, and the institutions sitting in between.

Whoever writes the paper, the tools have to be trustworthy

If we are going to hand more of the writing, the citing and eventually the analysis to machines, then the tools doing that work have to verify before they assert, keep provenance attached, and leave ownership with the human whose name is on the paper.

Do we actually need to write research papers at all?

If we are going to lean on the creativity and the cross-domain thinking of human researchers, then surely that should be where the human time goes.

The new era of going “Fast and Far” in research

A Nobel Prize in Chemistry went, in effect, to software. The old trade-off between small fast teams and large slow ones has stopped holding.

Academia has a new preprints problem

Researchers are pulling the LLM slot-machine lever for novel physics, then wrapping the output in LaTeX. What that looks like from inside a preprint platform.

Have we already hit the peer review breaking point?

Notes from the Royal Society's Future of Scientific Publishing: what does review look like when every paper is AI-generated or co-authored?

AI Needs New Facts – The Value of Novel Scientific Research

Hearing Demis Hassabis at SXSW London: if models train on what already exists, genuinely novel experimental results become the scarce input.

From Gold to Diamond: Is Equitable Open Access Still a Mirage?

Gold Open Access growth is slowing, and Hybrid is filling the gap rather than Diamond. What the numbers say about equitable publishing.

The Perpetual Research Cycle: AI's Journey Through Data, Papers, and Knowledge

Testing ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude at turning datasets into papers, and what a genuinely self-feeding research cycle would require.

The Role of Foundations and Technology Companies in Fuelling Optimism in Academic Research

As North American grant funding wobbles, Evo-2 and Google's AI co-scientist show where research optimism is now coming from instead.

Types of AI Agents and Their Applications in Academic Research

Model-based, goal-based, learning and utility agents: a practical taxonomy of AI agents and where each one fits in academic research.