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@pubtechr

• Technology • Publishing • Strategy • Innovation • AI • Easily distracted by anything new Newsletter: https://pubtechradar.substack.com/

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Latest posts by PubTech Radar @pubtechr

It was utterly fascinating to get screenshots of some student project work that I was loosely involved with. I didn't recognise any of the (not uni-provided) tech platforms being used. At one point, it seemed everyone had Kimi on their phones (atypical group though & prob just latest trend).

07.03.2026 11:56 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

I agree, I doubt many think that way. My interaction with students is incredibly limited, but the few I do interact with are typically tech-related Chinese students at UK Unis who are 100% embedded in Chinese tech.

07.03.2026 11:56 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Gosh, I am full of the joys of spring today 😉. I went to the talk posted ‪by @eve.gd ‬ (bsky.app/profile/eve....), and I'm still pondering where we might end up - there definitely aren't enough diverse voices developing this tech.

07.03.2026 11:32 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Bit of an aside, but I can also imagine staff whose teaching effectiveness gets quietly assessed through evidence of what students are asking in their AI. (There are IT systems rather than library systems afterall).

07.03.2026 11:23 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

There's also a safeguarding angle – what's a university's responsibility if a student becomes harmfully overdependent on an AI system it endorses, and I assume monitors? Assume there will be a cohort that will embrace, and an equal cohort challenged by monitoring

07.03.2026 11:23 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Given your AI history, personalisation & projects aren't particularly portable, do you put a lot of work into a system you can't take with you when you leave? I've been part of some interesting business discussions about who owns this work & how much, if anything, you can take with you to a new job

07.03.2026 11:23 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Non-university AI seems sensible to me, except for 100% legit academic work. I suspect we'll see some horror stories about students being flagged for 'non-compliant' academic use under policies they've never read, and possibly retrospective log-trawling to prove a case.

07.03.2026 11:23 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0

It's an interesting post. I wasn't sure if the argument was that students are stopping using AI, or switching to non-university AI, or some combination of both happening, but to different groups.

07.03.2026 10:54 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
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Helen King (@pubtechradar) Worth spending time with this article from @scott cunningham: https://causalinf.substack.com/p/claude-code-27-research-and-publishing According to Scott's thinking: Economists currently submit a...

Worth spending time with this article from Scott Cunningham:

Summary and my thoughts here: substack.com/@pubtechrada...

Original article here:
substack.com/home/post/p-...

06.03.2026 10:28 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

Both I think - definitely Windows. It’s an excel add-in. I have no real use for it so was just playing around.

05.03.2026 08:19 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Have you tried the (beta) Claude plugin for excel yet? Wondering if it’s me or problems at Claude’s end but it’s been really shockingly bad on simple tasks like a draw graph and some calculations - supports all the AI naysayer’s worst fears about hallucinations.

05.03.2026 01:15 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

I'm a beginner NotebookLM user, but as a person doing basic research tasks with a set of docs, it's incredibly useful & I would have loved it as a student. It's not perfect; more carefully worded questions give better results, and yes, image outputs can be riddled with errors, but still very useful.

11.02.2026 12:05 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

I read this article and had questions about the framing/accuracy of a couple of points. I haven't commented & don't feel fully confident responding, as I'm not an expert in technical details. A bit hypocritical, I know, but I'd want someone to do the same for my posts when I get things wrong.

11.02.2026 12:05 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

I’m working on a small, experimental tool that creates narrative, multi-signal overviews for scholarly books (citations, usage, attention).

Looking for a few (university) presses (and others) to test an MVP and give candid feedback.

Open data. No black boxes. DM me.

#scholarlypublishing #books

11.02.2026 08:34 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
AI & Me - a snapshot of how people in publishing are using AI right now.

AI & Me - a snapshot of how people in publishing are using AI right now.

Please fill out my AI usage survey if you work in publishing.
Which models are you using? How often? What's delivering value? Takes under 5 minutes. Contributors get early access to results before I share them more widely towards the end of the month: ai-and-me.innovationideas.co.uk

08.02.2026 13:10 👍 3 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0

This is a strange book. Lots of interesting points, but I didn't get the conflation of LLM AI with all uses of AI. Lots of good uses of machine learning. AI is bad was overdone, and I think it weakened their arguments. If 50+% of US adults are using LLMs, it's hard to argue they aren't useful.

08.02.2026 12:34 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Crixet Voice Mode
Crixet Voice Mode YouTube video by Victor Powell

Love this demo of Crixet (now Prism). For all the talk of robotic labs and AI accelerating science, the reality is Victor Powell, the developer, in his kitchen, minding the baby (the high-value work), while talking to an AI tool to handle the writing: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce-S...

29.01.2026 13:15 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

@mrstew.bsky.social might know.

14.01.2026 16:49 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

I think you're being a bit harsh on yourself! There's a world of difference between someone with genuine expertise sharing knowledge and the AI Grifter crowd.

12.01.2026 16:27 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

I love these! I think I'm probably closest to The Tool Magpie - though hopefully the more discerning end of the spectrum :-)

12.01.2026 16:13 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Post image

🚨 New issue of PubTech Radar is out: lnkd.in/eaCsVfja

12.01.2026 16:00 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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Anna Aslanyan | On the Picket Line On Monday morning, more than a hundred people formed a picket line outside one of the entrances to the British Library...

British Library staff asked for a decent pay. Instead they got ‘a few money-saving present ideas’, such as ‘consider not giving presents this holiday season’. They are on strike this week. I wrote about it for @lrb.co.uk. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

10.12.2025 13:14 👍 597 🔁 288 💬 6 📌 21
Photo of an AI-generated white board  about the LLama 3 herd of models paper

Photo of an AI-generated white board about the LLama 3 herd of models paper

From Pietro Schirano (@skirano) on X writing about Nano Banana Pro: "Here’s my favorite use case so far: take papers or really long articles and turn them into a detailed whiteboard photo."

How to video: x.com/skirano/stat...

27.11.2025 11:18 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

😀

27.11.2025 11:15 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

“everything produced by an AI is a hallucination…” is becoming a ritual disclaimer. Hopefully, people will drop this one soon.

27.11.2025 10:05 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
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Scholar Labs: An AI Powered Scholar Search Research questions are often detailed. Answering them can require looking at a topic from multiple angles. Today, we are introducing Scholar...

Google Scholar gets into "AI powered" space Assuming this can use all the full-text they have indexed this might be a game changer. The timing of this release maybe suggests Gemini 3 is being used? scholar.googleblog.com/2025/11/scho... . Apparently some hit a waitlist, I have access though (1)

19.11.2025 10:18 👍 10 🔁 10 💬 1 📌 2
Preview
2025 Report: Technology Needs of Small and Medium Journal Publishers Insights into smaller-sized publishers' technical priorities, from research integrity to AI adoption.

A new report from Scholastica and Maverick Publishing surveyed 83 small and medium journal publishers from 21 countries about their tech challenges: lp.scholasticahq.com/technology-n...

Some stats:
* Current AI adoption is limited. Only 8% of publishers are using AI tools extensively.

14.11.2025 20:36 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0
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Big Ideas in Publishing: Jonathan Woahn on AI Licensing Infrastructure New interview: Jonathan Woahn on how his startup Cashmere gives publishers control over their content in AI systems. As Jonathan puts it, they provide tools to manage entitlement, security, access, re...

New interview in the newsletter: Jonathan Woahn on how his startup Cashmere gives publishers control over their content in AI systems. As Jonathan puts it, they provide tools to manage entitlement, security, access, reporting, and turn-key RAG infrastructure. open.substack.com/pub/pubtechr...

12.11.2025 18:07 👍 4 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 1

Amazed by the volume of last minute submissions... Still a little birdie tells me unofficially the form will be open for a few more days...

10.11.2025 13:10 👍 5 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 1
AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations Learn to collaborate with AI systems effectively, efficiently, ethically, and safely

Although I do like Anthropic's AI Fluency course: anthropic.skilljar.com/ai-fluency-f...

10.11.2025 09:10 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0