Yesterday, I wrote about science publishing profiteer Elsevier's legal threats against Citationsy, in which the company claimed that the mere act of linking to Sci-Hub (an illegal open-access portal) was itself illegal.

Sci-Hub (previously) is a scrappy, nonprofit site founded in memory of Aaron Swartz, dedicated to providing global access to the world's scholarship — journal articles that generally report on publicly-funded research, which rapacious, giant corporations acquire for free, and then charge the very same institutions that paid for the research millions of dollars a year to access.

Elsevier (previously) is one of the titans of academic and scientific publishing, a wildly profitable and politically potent corporation whose market dominance has allowed it to extract ever-larger sums from the universities whose researchers provide the vast majority of the material it publishes — material it does not have to pay for, and in some cases, material it charges money to publish.

Bahnhof is the Swedish free-speech-oriented ISP that was finally forced to block access to Sci-Hub (a site providing principled access to paywalled scientific literature) retaliated against science publishing giant Elsevier and the Swedish Patent and Market Court by blocking access to their sites for Bahnhof customers, redirecting requests to a page explaining why the block was in place. — Read the rest

The Swedish ISP Bahnhof has a strong historic commitment to free speech, so when the notoriously corrupt science publishing giant Elsevier (previously) sought to force the ISP to censor connections to the open access site Sci-Hub (previously), the ISP went to court to resist the order.

Germany's DEAL project, which includes over 60 major research institutions, has announced that all of its members are canceling their subscriptions to all of Elsevier's academic and scientific journals, effective January 1, 2017.

Elsevier is one of the world's largest scholarly publishers and one of the most bitter enemies that open access publishing has; SSRN is one of the biggest open access scholarly publishing repositories in the world: what could possibly go wrong?

Joly writes, "Sauropod specialist Mike Taylor notes growing concern among scientists about the heavy-handed takedown practices of academic publishing company Elsevier, including serving DMCA notices on contributing authors who also self-publish their papers.

(Thanks, Joly!)

Winston Hide, is an associate professor of bioinformatics and computational biology at the Harvard School of Public Health. He was also — until recently — the associate editor of the prestigious (and expensive!) Elsevier journal Genomics. In a column in The Guardian, he explains why he resigned from Genomics: people are dying because scientists in poor companies can't afford proprietary journals. — Read the rest

Science publishing giant Elsevier has pulled its support from the Research Works Act, a bill that would have restricted the ability of scientists doing government-funded work to place their papers with open access journals. The action follows a scholarly and scientific boycott of Elsevier, and has led to the collapse of the bill. — Read the rest

Over 1,000 academics and scholars have signed a petition against science-publishing titan Elsevier, taking issue with the company's exploitative and abusive dealings with its writers, and with its support of laws that hinder good scientific collaboration, like SOPA and the Research Works Act. — Read the rest

Remember the revelation that pharma giant Merck had paid Elsevier to publish a fake peer-reviewed journal that promoted its products? Turns out Elsevier has an entire division devoted to publishing fake journals for money:

Now, several librarians say that they have uncovered an entire imprint of 'advertorial' publications.

Pharmaceutical giant Merck paid science publishing juggernaut Elsevier to publish a fake peer-reviewed scientific journal, Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine.

What's wrong with this is so obvious it doesn't have to be argued for. What's sad is that I'm sure many a primary care physician was given literature from Merck that said, "As published in Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, Fosamax outperforms all other medications…."

It seems like every company in the world right now is eager to push their large-language modeling algorithms as a brilliant innovation in the realm of generative general artificial intelligence. That includes Alphabet, whose primary tool (and originally namesake) was a genuinely revolutionary search engine that became so ubiquitous that the company seemingly had no choice but to completely eviscerate everything good about it in order to keep making an even more absurd profit. — Read the rest

Eaten by a frog? Just make your way through its digestive system and walk right out its "cloacal aperture".

According to a Kobe University statement, this study marks the first time that researchers have witnessed prey quickly and actively escape the body of its predator after being eaten.

A recent study in the journal of Current Biology titled "Associative learning in the box jellyfish Tripedalia cystophora" presents evidence that some species of gelatinous medusa are capable of associative learning — which is to say, they can remember things, and apply that knowledge to their future decision-making — despite not having brains. — Read the rest

Music therapy involves working with a trained professional who uses musical experiences—usually in a one-on-one or group setting—to help lift depression, reduce anxiety, or achieve other health goals. That's different than "music medicine" which can be done solo: just turn on a playlist and listen. — Read the rest

From NewScientist:

A miniature, shape-shifting robot can liquefy itself and reform, allowing it to complete tasks in hard-to-access places and even escape cages. It could eventually be used as a hands-free soldering machine or a tool for extracting swallowed toxic items.

What was the impact of colonial violence, disease and genocide on the population of indigenous Americans when the lost Genoese predator, Christopher Columbus, stumbled into the islands of Taino peoples in 1492? How many indigenous people died? How did they die? — Read the rest

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So…exactly how long has that ratty towel been hanging on your towel rod? We don't mean when was the last time it was washed. — Read the rest