I’m always thankful for yet another solid month of full booking, but whole days have gone by and I have barely left the house. I have gazed for hours out of my home office window at people strolling past in the hot sunshine wearing, well – not very much …
And now summer is officially over, with barely any time spent scanning the horizon to see what’s been going on in the world of science publishing, it looks like everyone has either checked out for the summer or been sacked by President Trump for simply advocating good science or doing their job without fear or favour. Shira Perlmutter (https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/04/copyright_office_trump_filing/) and Susan Monarez (https://www.science.org/content/article/attempt-oust-cdc-director-sparks-key-resignations-agency-officials) deserve better. This is how totalitarianism starts – erase the truth and those who uphold it. Divide and conquer, using ‘alternative facts’.
In parallel, the Trump administration’s blind worship of the AI industry is being felt in the US library and information sector, where the painstaking cataloguing work underpinning its infrastructure is under threat from a push to allow corporate entities to employ large language models (LLMs) to make cataloguing decisions, rather than trained librarians – as reported by Mike Olsen in ‘The Scholarly Kitchen’ (https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/08/26/guest-post-beyond-classification-the-human-cost-of-library-and-information-labor-under-digital-capitalism/). He cites the low scores for accurate prediction of subject headings and classification models achieved by LLMs, and he’s not optimistic about the implications, particularly the potential for blocking of searches on topics such as vaccine safety.
The last word belongs to the inimitable John McIntyre, whose disdain of the Trump administration is matched only by his deadly accuracy in targeting the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt (https://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2025/08/tais-toi-karoline.html).
Hello, autumn – tell summer to switch off the lights on the way out.