A media critique responds to The Atlantic's essay 'The End of Reading Is Here,' which traces literacy decline through history and blames tech and schools for falling reading habits. The response argues the piece ignores the publishing industry's own role in the decline, including pricing, printing and distribution decisions, and notes that executives who recently announced the death of the mass-market paperback also avoided self-blame, instead citing shifting consumer behavior.
jacobin.com
· 2026-10-12
Retraction Watch identified the nonsensical phrase 'vegetative electron microscopy' appearing repeatedly in recent academic papers. The term originated from a faulty optical character recognition scan of a 1959 paper that merged 'vegetative cell' from one text column with 'electron microscopy' from an adjacent column. The phrase has since propagated into databases and, apparently, into AI-generated or AI-assisted manuscripts submitted to journals.
sciencebase.com
· 2026-10-08
arXiv announced a rate-limiting policy applying to all submitters and categories, effective October 1, 2026, citing an unsustainable surge in paper submissions. The organization reported September 2024 submissions of 40,363, roughly double the figure from two years earlier, generating nearly 9,000 support tickets for staff and moderators. arXiv said AI tools are helping drive the increase, and moderators are seeing more thin, narrow-scope papers that fail to meet scholarly standards.
blog.arxiv.org
· 2026-10-01
Film, television, publishing and other creative sectors are experiencing some of their steepest job declines in decades, according to reporting on the trend. The downturn coincides with the broader rollout of AI tools across media and entertainment companies.
gizmodo.com
· 2026-09-29
Vita is a new English-language, open-access biology journal jointly funded by China's Higher Education Press and Westlake University, with its first print issue released in July. It waives article-processing charges for authors and is fully Chinese-owned and Chinese-published, unlike many past China-based journals that partnered with international publishers.
nature.com
· 2026-09-29
A Nature commentary contends that ongoing debates over whether AI systems can be credited as authors on scholarly papers miss a more fundamental change underway in how research knowledge itself is generated. The piece suggests focus should shift from authorship credit rules toward examining how AI tools are altering the processes of scholarly inquiry.
nature.com
· 2026-09-29
IEEE TryEngineering has launched a six-book STEM series for readers ages 8 to 12, published by Lerner Publishing Group and titled Tomorrow's Technology With TryEngineering, Powered by IEEE. Each title pairs age-appropriate explanations with real-world examples and design challenges, covering subjects like artificial intelligence and communication technology, and draws on ebooks and videos from tryengineering.org. The project involved several IEEE societies, including Communications, Computer, and Oceanic Engineering, plus the Transportation Electrification Council.
spectrum.ieee.org
· 2026-09-28
A preprint posted on MetaArXiv on September 8 identified roughly 1,000 online ads for freelance peer-reviewer positions and included interviews with five current and former researchers in India, Spain and the UK who said they had taken such jobs. The study, led by Radboud University's Amna Pottarath, suggests some journals may be outsourcing peer review to third-party firms, though it does not name specific journals or quantify how widespread the practice is.
nature.com
· 2026-09-28
A study published in PLOS One by Gabriel Budel of Delft University of Technology and colleagues found that more than 3,000 academic article titles across disciplines borrow from Beatles song titles and lyrics. Using the Scopus database, the researchers identified 2,237 exact references and 963 instances of wordplay, spanning fields from medicine to computer science, economics and the humanities. The top 10 Beatles songs alone appeared in 1,584 article titles, far outpacing similar counts for Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley.
phys.org
· 2026-09-26
An Entrepreneur contributor and author of 'The Authority Advantage' argues that books, keynotes and courses generate value mainly through indirect channels—faster client conversion, referrals, partnerships and pricing power—rather than through royalties, speaking fees or enrollment revenue. The piece frames this as a shift from being an 'operator with something to sell' to an 'authority with something to teach.'
entrepreneur.com
· 2026-09-25
A study by literature scholar and archivist Jolie Braun, drawing on three memoirs, examines women who sold books door-to-door across the rural US in the late 1800s, before public libraries were widespread. These agents took orders from sample copies and later delivered Bibles, manuals, biographies and fiction, including works by Ulysses S. Grant and Mark Twain, some of which sold hundreds of thousands of copies via subscription publishing. One bookseller, Annie Nelles Dumond, wrote in 1868 about entering the trade after being abandoned by two husbands, and about wearing a mourning bonnet to conceal her past while working across Illinois and Indiana.
daily.jstor.org
· 2026-09-21
IEEE held educational workshops in February in Nairobi, at the University of Rwanda, and at Makerere University in Uganda, drawing more than 120 attendees. The sessions, led by IEEE staff and volunteer authors, covered how to prepare, submit, and get papers peer-reviewed, along with guidance on using IEEE Xplore and ensuring research integrity.
spectrum.ieee.org
· 2026-09-07
GoKawiil