🍎your Scholarly Digest 8th May, 2025

Academia essentials hand-picked fortnightly for the mindful scholar

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Thumbnail (online): Mechanical Man by Bill McConkey, Wellcome Collection.

Hi Scholar,

Lately, we’ve been receiving a trickle of reflections, thoughts, and responses to our Letters and it’s made us extremely happy. There are two reasons for this. First, as we said in our last edition of the Digest, we see our project of sending out Letters as a way to facilitate ideas and discussions about knowledge, research, and science among scholars. But so far, it’s mostly been been us - The Critic and The Tatler - writing to you. That some of you are now writing back to us means these Letters are becoming a true two-way correspondence.

The second reason why we’re positively glowing is because…well, it confirms that we’re not just shouting out into the abyss (which we’ll admit, it sometimes feels like).

So, dear Scholar, please do write to us. Spill some of your ink our way. It doesn’t have to be clean or formal: just send your thoughts and wanderings as they come to you, we would love to read them. They inspire us, and motivate us to keep going.

In other news, we want to draw your attention the Open Science and Scholarship Festival that’s taking place in London from June 2nd-6th, 2025. They’re organizing a bunch of interesting events - some of them hybrid - and a few have caught our fancy: including sessions on ‘creativity in research and engagement’, and ‘how open is possible, and how closed is necessary’. We’ll be there, and we would love to meet you if you’ll be attending too.

BRAIN FOOD

On Postplagiarism

Perhaps anyone who identifies as a scholar will be familiar with plagiarism: it's the unforgivable sin that no scholar dares commit - a stain on scholarly integrity. We all know what it is: the act of passing off someone else’s work as your own. And yet, despite this familiarity, the academic literature fails to find consensus on what exactly counts as plagiarism. Some even argue it is “inherently indefinable.”

For a long time, though, we operated with a relatively stable, working understanding of plagiarism in our everyday practices of learning, writing, and research. But with the widespread emergence of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, our understanding of plagiarism appears to have been shaken up. Suddenly, we're uncertain. We find ourselves confronting questions of the following kind: 

“If I come up with my own ideas, write them out, and then ask ChatGPT to improve the writing, does that count as plagiarism?” 

“What if I ask it to generate an outline for me? Is that plagiarism?” 

Well, the topic of this week's Brain Food is the concept of ‘postplagiarism’, as developed in this article titled “Postplagiarism: Transdisciplinary Ethics and Integrity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and Neurotechnology” by Sarah Eaton, who also coined the term in her 2021 book ‘Plagiarism in Higher Education’. In her own words, post-plagiarism refers to:

From our reading, post-plagiarism doesn’t come across as a new academic policy about what follows plagiarism, but rather as an intellectual paradigm shift: one that takes seriously the technologies and machines of our time that are making a difference to how we think, write, and learn. It reads like an invitation to reconsider our educational and research practices in light of our increasing integration with technologies. 

For instance, one of the key tenets of post-plagiarism is the idea of ‘hybrid writing’:

a kind of output that ‘is neither fully written by a human, nor by an AI, but one that is hybrid’. 

It is a form of writing whereby it becomes impossible - and as argued by Sarah Eaton, even pointless - to identify where human input ends, and where AI input begins. 

This understanding of post-plagiarism, to us, feels like a Haraway-esque reframing of plagiarism - one that interrogates the concept through the figure of the cyborg: the hybrid human-machine being.

There's a lot to unpack in the idea of post-plagiarism, and this Brain Food isn’t the place to tackle it all. But it’s an important development in our scholarly world and one we think are worth being aware of as Scholars. 

NEWS ANALYSIS

Diamonds are Made Under Pressure

A journal you’ve probably never heard of (Energy Humanities) has agreed to be published by a publisher you’ve never heard of - the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) -starting in 2026. Dear Scholar, obscure as this may seem, believe us when we say: it’s big news.

Energy Humanities will become the 34th journal to be published under a Diamond Open Access Model by the Open Library for Humanities.

Unlike more familiar publishing models involving paywalls or article processing charges, Diamond Open Access is a relatively new model that is completely free for both authors and readers. Without charging fees of any kind, Diamond OA relies on donations from institutions (like university libraries, and charitable foundations). 

OLH, for example, is primarily funded by 340 university and public libraries, reflecting a growing trend among universities to bring publishing activities back in-house. The Diamond OA model is less “commercially viable” and, perhaps unsurprisingly, not particularly widespread, which is why we wanted to draw your attention to OLH’s latest milestone. The publisher shows no signs of stopping either; OLH and other small Diamond OA publishers are planning to launch the Open Journals Collective, a community-led effort to expand access to quality Diamond OA journals. 

The academic publishing industry is dominated by a handful of large publishing houses that use their size and influence to reap enormous profits - not unlike how Big Tech dominates our digital spaces. These publishing houses dictate how much knowledge is worth to institutions in a monetary sense, but also through their use of impact metrics and quality indicators:

Is a journal indexed in Scopus? In Web of Science? What is the Impact Factor?

The biggest challenge OLH faces in its mission of making knowledge more open and accessible is not only a financial one.

Will academics, especially early career researchers, be willing to publish in these journals; will universities recognise these outputs?

One would hope that after diverting funding to maintaining these journals, universities would follow up by recognizing outputs in these journals in their evaluation frameworks. Otherwise what's the point of funding a Diamond OA journal portfolio?

RESOURCES

Rigour Mortis

We all strive to be rigorous in our work, for scholarship is nothing if it is not rigorous. The idea of rigour is something scholarship is soaked in, however as a concept in research, rigour is relatively new. It’s difficult to define and, rather ironically, difficult to examine closely. How does one “rigorously” interrogate rigour?  

This week’s Resource is an essay on the history of rigour in scholarship. The author, Robert Nelson, writes from his perspective as a Professor in the arts and humanities, however scholars in any field will benefit from this essay (one might suggest it is essential reading for “hard” scientists who hold a 'narrow' view of objectivity and fact).     

Nelson challenges us to ponder a fascinating question: is the idea of rigour not a metaphor in itself? We treat rigour in scholarship as though it is a clear-cut, objective concept, and yet, it has a range of meanings and associations. Is it desirable (or even possible) to apply the metaphor of rigour to all modes of inquiry, to all ways of researching?

Write back with your thoughts once you’ve read the essay, we’d love to know what you thought; just hit reply on this email. 

OPPORTUNITIES

Funded PhDs, Postdocs and Academic job openings

• PhD, Postdoctoral, and Academic Positions @ University of Zurich, Switzerland: click here

• Postdoctoral Positions @ The George Washington University, USA: click here

• Postdoc and Academic Positions @ University of Alberta, Canada; Postdoc positions: click here / Academic positions: click here

• PhD Positions @ Lund University, Sweden: click here

KEEPING IT REAL

Explain Academic Publishing Like I’m 5

A few years ago, on a platform that used to be called Twitter, someone asked:

“explain academic publishing like I’m 5”

This metaphor does a pretty good job and ties in nicely with our News this week:

P.S. Is anyone still active on X (formerly Twitter)? 

The Tatler just set up a new account and could use some good people to follow. Or have you all migrated to Bluesky? The Tatler’s there too - and still looking for interesting scholars to follow.

We care about what you think and would love to hear from you. Hit reply or drop a comment and tell us what you like (or don't) about The Scholarly Letter.