Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1)

Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, …

Winners Take All — Anand Giridharadas

Anand Giridharadas is the author of Winners Take All. An insider’s groundbreaking investigation of how the global elite’s efforts to “change the world” preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve.

BICS Essay Contest Winners

The winners were chosen based on the power of the arguments presented and on how persuasively the essays made the case for survival of human consciousness beyond a reasonable doubt as though you were in a courtroom. While the judges were reading and re-reading the 204 submitted essays, they were conscious of the great responsibility of choosing the top three. The judges chose these principal winners with exquisite care.

The State of Papers, Retractions, and Preprints: Evidence from the CrossRef Database (2004-2024)

A 20-year analysis of CrossRef metadata demonstrates that global scholarly output -- encompassing publications, retractions, and preprints -- exhibits strikingly inertial growth, well-described by exponential, quadratic, and logistic models with nearly indistinguishable goodness-of-fit. Retraction dynamics, in particular, remain stable and minimally affected by the COVID-19 shock, which contributed less than 1% to total notices. Since 2004, publications doubled every 9.8 years, retractions every 11.4 years, and preprints at the fastest rate, every 5.6 years. The findings underscore a system primed for ongoing stress at unchanged structural bottlenecks. Although model forecasts diverge beyond 2024, the evidence suggests that the future trajectory of scholarly communication will be determined by persistent systemic inertia rather than episodic disruptions -- unless intentionally redirected by policy or AI-driven reform.

When Nature Calls: The Enshittification of Science and Its Enablers

Proof-of-work papers, policy laundering, and the collapse of self-correction

The Gutenberg Parenthesis

A 2024 CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLEPROSE AWARDS MEDIA AND CULTURAL STUDIES FINALIST 2024The Gutenberg Parenthesis traces the epoch of print from its fatefu…

How Ten Publishers Retract Research

Retractions are the primary mechanism for correcting the scholarly record, yet publishers differ markedly in how they use them. We present a bibliometric analysis of 46,087 retractions across 10 major publishers using data from the Retraction Watch database (1997-2026), examining retraction rates, reasons, temporal trends, and geographic distributions, among other dimensions. Normalized retraction rates vary by two orders of magnitude, from Elsevier's 3.97 per 10,000 publications to Hindawi's 320.02. China-affiliated authors account for the largest share of retractions at every publisher. Retraction lags and reason profiles also vary widely across publishers. Among the ten publishers, ACM is an outlier in its retraction profile. ACM's normalized rate is mid-range (5.65), yet 98.3% of its 354 retractions are related to one incident. Seven of the ten most common global retraction reasons (including misconduct, plagiarism, and data concerns) are entirely absent from ACM's record. ACM's first retraction dates to 2020, despite a catalog dating to 1997. ACM self-describes its retraction threshold as "extremely high." We discuss this threshold in relation to the COPE retraction guidelines and the implications of ACM's non-public dark archive of removed works.