May
18
Facing up to Father: The pleasures and pains of a Cotswold childhood
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New book by David Worlock. Pre-order now at Marble Hill Publishers or Amazon.
A small Cotswold farm is the setting for a classic struggle of wills. Robert Worlock, eccentric and demanding, resolutely maintains the old ways, determined above all to make his son into a farmer fit to take over the family acres. His son, David, is equally determined not to be bullied into something he neither wants nor likes. His childhood becomes a battleground: can he find a way to make his father love him without denying his right to determine his own life?
Apr
21
John Milton, AI, Florence, blindness and scholarly communications
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Here is an abbreviated version of some closing remarks delivered at the 25th meeting of the FIESOLE RETREAT, held at the European University Institute , 7-10 April 2025.
John Milton came to Florence in the late spring of 1638. His back was sore from the unsprung post chaise that carried him up from Rome. He took a room at the Palazzo dei Gaddi and walked that evening in the cool gardens in front of his lodgings, nicknamed “Paradiso“. The poet, perfecting his Italian and Latin which served him well during his diplomatic service for the English republic in the coming years, was not yet troubled by the blindness that was to afflict him in later years. However, as I journied to Florence this week, one month after being registered blind in the UK, I reflected more on the eyesight condition of one of the people who Milton visited: Galileo Gallilei, the 77-year-old scientist who was not just partially blind at this time but also under an interdict from the Papal authorities not to reveal anything about his discoveries and observations. Milton had a letter of introduction and went to visit the great scientist on the hill where he made his observations here at Fiesole. He stared at the full moon through the old man’s telescope and recorded in his correspondence, his impressions of the shining orb with its strange patchwork of canals and craters.
The point of this anecdote is not to remind us of the huge impact that his five or six months in Florence made on the English poet. The valley of the river Arno becomes an image of paradise lost by Adam and Eve; when Satan is expelled from heaven, he sets foot at Vallambrosa (20 miles from Fiesole); and that mighty orb seen through the telescope becomes the image of the shield on Satan’s arm. More important for our current concerns is that one of Milton‘s many correspondents at this time was Samuel Hartleb. A man of Polish-Lithuanian birth, whose mother was the daughter of a rich English merchant in Gdansk, Hartlieb had settled in London and was a friend and neighbour of Samuel Pepys in Axe Yard. From the late 1630s through to his death in 1662, Hartlieb wrote some 25,000 letters, addressing recipients all over Europe, enquiring into scientific investigation and the results of experimentation. From Kepler to to Galileo to Huygens to Comenius. In England he was an associate of Robert Boyle, corresponded with Newton, observed the experiments of Hooke. He was well known to Christopher Wren, and became a close associate of John Wilkins, the masterful Warden of Wadham College Oxford, whose circle was to transmogrify into the Royal Society after the restoration of the monarchy. These men knew Samuel Hartlieb as “the great intelligencer“ . The penetrating questions that he asked and his continual demand for detail of experiments, their methodology and their results lie directly behind the development of the Transactions of the Royal Society, as recorded, structured and formulated by his friend and associate, Henry Oldenburg. (It is important alsoto note that very similar developments were happening in France at exactly the same time).
The proceedings of the last three days demonstrate the same evolution still taking place. The world of Hartlieb and Oldenburg was of course made possible by the proliferation of the world of print then in its second century in Europe. Things move faster now. In our world, governed by network communications carrying digital data flows, some things have had to change. Samuel Hartlieb would have been the very first person to see the need for evolution in scholarly communication. He would have appreciated the movement from content to data and he would have seen the importance of metadata, links and linkages. While no doubt he would have admired his own work, his 25,000 letters, skilfully archived in a collection at the University of Sheffield, he would also have seen clearly that disassociated objects can be brought together in the network both to create new metadata and to create associations between data which did not exist in any form before. It does not take much to imagine a breathless letter to Milton celebrating the glorious ability granted by AI to associate information in entirely new ways so as to create fresh knowledge. Had he not spent his lifetime doing this? Interrupting the poet, during the writing of the Areopagitica, the great tract on free speech , he would have explained it all in that age before science was regarded as so distinctly different from the humanities. He would have said that just as he had striven to ensure that the scientific record contained everything that had taken place, now the scientist could have upon his screen the full fruits of the inquiry process of all relevant experimentation and thinking. All of the notes and the findings, the jottings and the formal statements , with the potential ability to examine every aspect of the knowledge base in the light of every other aspect. He would’ve known that in this process new knowledge could be revealed.
Samuel Hartlieb would have made a good time traveller. If his intelligence had chanced into our meeting rooms in these last three days, he would have admired the architecture, enjoyed many of the debates but might have been a little shocked by the narrowness of some attitudes towards data and information . He might have been saddened by the thought that science and the humanities were pulling apart to the extent that their methods of communication and analysis were becoming wholly different in the digital world. As an example, the world of the journal, beginning around the period of his own death, was diminishing in the digital age of the sciences, while it was still entrenched in the humanities. He might have wondered whether a people so clever as to use AI with growing success, seemingly ignored the value of so much of the other occasional exchanges in the scientific world and the wisdom contained therein. Where were the blogs, the letters, and the reviews, he might have asked? Where are the videos, and the seminar sessions and the discussions. from which you could now track and map so many significant inputs? Where is the coding? And above, why is the evidential data not securely attached to every article and available to every researcher?
I feel that he would have sat down impatiently and planned new ways of creating the record, safeguarding the record, and utilising the record, and that AI would have been his invaluable tool just as his quill pen on parchment was in the 1650s. I think that the thing which would have truly appalled him was our problems of integrity and data reliability. He had been a student at Cambridge, and I think he would have wondered why the great institutions and laboratories of our modern world did not publish their own research findings and the data, and validate them prior to release. He would surely have admired the brand values that his friends created at the Royal Society after his death. He might have wondered why, if any institution could rent access to publication software and peer review checking systems based on AI, it might not be possible to put peer reviewed articles direct from the lab onto a reliable server. open to access by all scholars?
Because my ignorance is greater than that of Samuel Hartlieb, I learned more from this Conference and I thank each and every contributor for their part in that. But the in particular I must thank Michele Casalini and his staff at Casalini Libri, the librarian of the European University Institute, Pep Torn Poch, and his staff, and the fine people at Charleston, led by Becky Lenzini and Ward Shaw , who created the agenda and invited me to sweep up at the end.
Apr
15
“10 reasons why the science research journal has passed its sell-by date “
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Two weeks ago, at this year‘s UKSG conference in Brighton, I took part in a debate, co-hosted by Toby Green, co-founder of coherent digital, Sarah Main, vice president of academic relations at Elsevier and myself. My proposal was roughly in line with the title of this blog. The debate was run twice , and on each occasion I promised the audience that I had 10 reasons behind my argument that it was time to change the science scholarly communication ecosystem .Of course, we never got round to discussing all of the reasons, but I promised that if there was any room left on the door of the church at Wittenberg then I would post my theses there in good Lutheran fashion . So here they now are!
1 Open access has plateaued and is beginning to decline. The system created to increase accessibility by lowering costs is being rejected on cost grounds. it’s volume based publishing model does not inspire trust.
2 The peer review system is broken and is losing the confidence of researchers , funders and consumers.
3 Users look in vain for a central retraction index and a transparent system to comprehensively log withdrawn articles
4 Publishing journals is still too slow for the purposes of the fastest moving sectors within science and technology
5 The cost of publishing in journals are too great to be sustained by the research community, and the benefits too little to encourage funders to meet the bill.
6 Many of the issues could be resolved if journal publishing offered the complete integrity– protection from papermills, bogus AI generated content et cetera – that users assume and expect
7 The need to standardise metadata,PIDs, and standard content coding (ISCC, C2 PA et cetera) maybe easier to accomplish in self publishing software than in existing publisher systems.
8 Giving recognition and validation to researchers and research institutions, whether for grant awards or job preferment, is better performed outside of journal branding and citation indexing systems which are too easily gamed and manipulated.
9 The research article/report/paper itself needs to change. Pre-registration of hypothesis and methodology prior to research commencement will be one factor. The need to associate articles with experimental data and other evidential material currently not handled by publishers is another. research findings also need to be associated with code, videos, images, audio material, blogs and other elements..
10. Researchers in many disciplines cannot afford the time to read papers in full. As a result, machine to machine communication becomes vital, and is not aided by current systems. The classic research article is a narrative form in a world with increasing the few human readers. Machines do not appreciate narrative: they perform better on world structured data clearly marked with metadata.
Conclusion: since the beginning of the digital age scholarly research publishing moved into a time lock, becoming outwardly digital while preserving the systems and structures of print in perpetuity. AI will change all of that, disintermediating redundant parts of the process and automating others.
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