PubTech Radar Scan: Issue 34
New launches dominate this issue: Cashmere, Wax, ScholarlyTrendSpotterGPT, Papercheck, Reviewer Three, JSTOR Seeklight, FAIA, and Imagetwin and more...
Life got in the way of newsletters over the past couple of weeks, so this is an epic issue. New launches include Cashmere, Wax, ScholarlyTrendSpotterGPT, Papercheck, Reviewer Three, JSTOR Seeklight, and FAIA. AI developments span datasets, licensing, peer review, publishing ethics, copyright, metadata, and collaboration. Other topics covered range from AI risks and data stewardship to transparency, publishing workflows, persistent IDs, and open infrastructure.
📰 News
📚 David Worlock and Adrian Stanley explore how real, synthetic, and open datasets are shaping the future of AI. New systems are being built to support FAIR data practices, ethical licensing, and community-led stewardship so that AI development stays transparent, inclusive, and responsible.
📚 Whilst Anthropic purchased, shredded, scanned, and discarded millions of books to train Claude, OpenAI and Microsoft are backing Harvard’s Institutional Data Initiative, which is digitising nearly a million public-domain volumes to train AI in a gentler way.
🆔 This ORCID-commissioned white paper explores how persistent researcher identifiers are being used by funders, research communities, and commercial platforms.
😞 Sad news from the open infra world: Knowledge Futures begins winding down PubPub Legacy and Platform hosting after a key funder pulls out. Copim has published a new post explaining its decision to move from PubPub to WordPress. It’s a clear guide to the options they considered and the trade-offs involved.
💡 At SSP’s Shark Tank, five teams pitched solutions to the sector’s biggest headaches: from murky peer reviews to science no one reads. The winner? An AI-powered comms tool that transforms dense research into engaging public content
🚀Launches and new product features
Cashmere helps publishers and authors maintain control over their intellectual property in an AI-driven world. It offers tools to manage rights and royalties, providing an ethical and structured approach to AI. Its focus on transparency and monetisation aims to future-proof traditional publishing against the rapid shifts in content consumption and automation.
Developed by Laura Harvey, ScholarlyTrendSpotterGPT offers a thoughtful application of AI in the scholarly publishing sector. This custom GPT is designed to interpret announcements, news, and faint signals with sector-specific intelligence to help with strategic thinking, meeting preparation, or navigating industry developments. Also worth reading: Mark Carden’s comparison of the Researcher to Reader Conference with others in the field.
Wax is a new open-source doc editor for teams. It has real-time editing, sharing, PDF generator, comments, Word import, and an AI designer, assistant, and knowledgebase - all AI tools are optional, off by default. (Blog post)
Reviewer Three is a multi-agent peer review platform offering instant AI feedback on research papers which was built in 90 mins at the AI Engineer World’s Fair [H/T: @hoohar.bsky.social]
The FAIA project offers a structured, transparent framework for disclosing AI contributions to digital content. Developed collaboratively by Liccium, Leiden University, and the GO FAIR Foundation, the initiative supports compliance with regulatory requirements, notably the EU AI Act, and encourages ethical, verifiable practices in content creation.
JSTOR Seeklight is an AI tool purpose-built to support archivists, not replace them. It generates high-quality metadata via a multi-step process involving classification, prompts, and human oversight. It's been co-developed with practitioners and is part of JSTOR's broader digital stewardship ecosystem.
Imagetwin’s AI-generated image detection is now out of beta. The upgraded tool no longer just flags suspect images; it also suggests which AI model, such as DALL·E, Firefly, or Stable Diffusion, most likely created them.
World Brain Scholar has unveiled an enhancement to its editorial assistant Eliza, introducing automated scope checks and internal journal recommendations.
Ian Mulvany has built a no-code citation converter using Claude.ai while still in bed. Users can paste references, pick a target style, and reformat with a click—when it works, that is. The “Failed to process citations” message reminds us that even magical tools have their Mondays. 😉
A collaborative team of researchers, including Lisa DeBruine, Daniël Lakens, René Bekkers, Cristian Mesquida, Max Littel and Jakub Werner have developed Papercheck, an open-source, modular tool that screens manuscripts for adherence to best practices. From power analyses to data sharing, the software offers automated, pre-submission checks to help authors identify common issues early (Blog post).
🤖 AI & Publishing
Keith Riegert’s “Getting Started with AI – USBS 2025” presentation is a practical yet slightly ominous tour of how AI is transforming every corner of book publishing. Everything from cover design and metadata to sales scripts, rights deals, and even the creation of entire books.
A one-day Book Sprint held at the University of Vienna provided insights into the integration of AI within collaborative writing. Focused on Ludology, the study of games, the session employed tools such as Otter.ai and ChatGPT to assist in drafting, with mixed success. While transcripts proved a valuable record, participants critiqued the AI-generated summaries for their tonal inconsistencies and lack of nuance.
Bryan Wilder explores the long-term, systemic risks of integrating LLMs into scientific peer review. Systemic risks go beyond accuracy; they could centralise judgment, incentivise conformity, and change how research is done, especially if authors start gaming the system or unconsciously tailoring work to please the machine.
This fascinating and detailed case study explains how Ashlyn Wang used Streamlit and ChainForge to improve AI-generated newsletter headlines, focusing on factual accuracy and stylistic coherence. Manual and automated evaluations revealed measurable gains in consistency and editorial alignment 📈. (H/T: Nicholas Diakopoulos)
The UK Government has just published a series of industrial strategies, including a Creative Industries Sector Plan. The plan includes a proposal for a new "Creative Content Exchange as a marketplace for selling, buying, licensing, and enabling permitted access to digitised cultural and creative assets.
Bohyun Kim shared her interesting slides from her May ALA webinar talk, “AI: The Good, the Bad, and the Surprise,” on the role of AI in libraries.
📽️ George Walkley explains how AI is affecting copyright, creativity, and accessibility in publishing. It’s a measured and clear summary of where things stand today.
📌 I’ve put together a list of 30 People to follow at the intersection of AI and Academic Publishing. It’s part spotlight and part cheat sheet, and it could do with a little updating. Suggestions welcome!
📚 Longer reads
📖 Interesting to see how Anthropic’s new multi-agent research system works behind the scenes. A lead Claude agent spawns multiple subagents that run searches in parallel, compressing vast info into concise answers. It outperforms single-agent Claude by around 90 percent but uses fifteen times more tokens.
📽️ An excellent three minutes from Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal, as she cuts through the hype around AI agents. Is the tradeoff worth it? Handing over access to your browser, credit card, address book, Signal or Gmail, calendar, and more, just for the convenience of autonomous agents doing things for you?
📽️ I enjoyed the latest a16z podcast, Where We Are in the AI Cycle. I really hope “vibe writing” doesn't catch on. Highlights include the limits of autonomy, the shifting role of PMs, and the idea that instead of one "killer app," we may see new capabilities spread across platforms. The episode also touches on Google's future and the ongoing challenges of automation, especially with messy data and complex decisions.
And finally…
“Afterlife” is a wonderfully creative yet utterly disturbing example of AI storytelling. It's evocative, unsettling, and well-crafted. It pulls you into a world where bots and avatars feel eerily human and alive.
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