🍎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.”

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