Marcel LaFlamme
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marcellaflamme.bsky.social
Marcel LaFlamme
@marcellaflamme.bsky.social
Helping research libraries support the future of scholarship. Anthro PhD, Quaker, Western Mass returner 🏳️‍🌈 Views my own.
Reposted by Marcel LaFlamme
In the MORPHSS report **Openness in the arts, humanities and social sciences: Documenting open research practices beyond STEM**, we explore the narrow focus of existing frameworks of open research & propose more inclusive ways of accommodating the diversity of open practice across all disciplines.
Openness in the arts, humanities and social sciences: Documenting open research practices beyond STEM (A MORPHSS Project Report)
Conceptual frameworks of 'Open Science' and their implementation by funders, journals, institutions and other organisations have been criticised on the grounds that they are tailored primarily to quan...
doi.org
February 9, 2026 at 9:28 AM
Very excited to help bring this event to fruition over the next two years, as ARL carries forward a commitment to the production of new knowledge that goes back to legacy offerings like our SPEC Kits and Research Library Issues publication. publications.arl.org
February 4, 2026 at 10:38 PM
Reposted by Marcel LaFlamme
ICYMI Allen Institute For #AI (Ai2) Announces Launch of Theorizer ("Turning Thousands Of Papers Into Scientific Laws") allenai.org/blog/theorizer @ai2.bsky.social
February 3, 2026 at 8:44 PM
Love how this new piece from @ubcokanagan.bsky.social's CE2 Lab brings #OpenScience to reflexive #ResearchCreation: "This protocol is offered as a (re)generative qualitative framework, open to iteration, variation, and adaptation."

www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fq...
Making Data From Drawing: How Step-by-Step Protocols Can Enrich Reflexive Inquiry in Qualitative Research | Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research
www.qualitative-research.net
January 27, 2026 at 3:18 PM
Reposted by Marcel LaFlamme
See our most recent resource on how repositories can mitigate the impact of AI bots. Spoiler alert, there is no silver bullet if you want to keep your repository open!!! coar-repositories.org/news-updates...
Mitigating the impact of AI bots
Over the past few years, repositories have been encountering a growing number of bots trying to access their resources. These bots, or crawlers, navigate the internet, gathering data and indexing i…
coar-repositories.org
January 20, 2026 at 1:12 PM
Reposted by Marcel LaFlamme
Anyone here know of studies of think tanks & research institutes, & their publications? I’m particularly interested in finding those that sponsor open-access journals but will take anything that discusses their publishing strategies.
January 13, 2026 at 4:45 PM
Reposted by Marcel LaFlamme
Upcoming UKSG Webinar (Feb. 5, 2026): The Open Access – #AI Conundrum: Does Free to Read Mean Free to Train? www.uksg.org/events/free-... #LLMs #oa #trainingdata #scholcomm #publishing @uksg.bsky.social
January 12, 2026 at 2:50 PM
On what would have been my dad's 83rd birthday, I'm starting a trial subscription to @theglobeandmail.com.

He would probably have preferred a French-language outlet, but it's part of my 2026 goal to deepen engagement with @arl.org's Canadian members and their national context.
January 12, 2026 at 2:11 PM
My last piece of writing for 2025. "If the constant challenge of staying in sync leads researchers to fixate on its accomplishment, then libraries can offer paths back to the wonder of discovery."

www.arl.org/blog/reperto...
Repertoires: How Researchers Struggle to Stay In Sync — Association of Research Libraries
The last few working days of a very long year are an apt moment to reflect on how we experience time within the research enterprise. A recent book by science...
www.arl.org
December 22, 2025 at 3:21 PM
@faineg.bsky.social My diss, in case it’s of interest: repository.rice.edu/items/e08f59...
Remaking the Pilot: Unmanned Aviation and the Transformation of Work in Postagrarian North Dakota
This dissertation examines changing forms of expertise and their institutionalization as piloting becomes an activity undertaken on the ground rather than in the sky. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in and around the city of Grand Forks, North Dakota between 2010 and 2015, I show how the maturation and proliferation of unmanned aircraft or drones has precipitated changes in what it means to be a pilot that, in turn, index wider transformations in contemporary work. The forms of skill associated with operating an aircraft are revealed to be in flux, as drone pilots learn to compose environments for perception and action and to navigate new media infrastructures. Yet transindividual social forms also prove to be evolving, as the profession of piloting is riven by heterogeneous temporalities and as the hobby takes on new importance as a handler of exceptions. This dissertation seeks to push past the fascination with spatial discontinuity that marks so many responses to the drone, and to locate the elaboration of this technology in a particular, troubled place. In making sense of a coordinated, decade-long effort to position North Dakota as a center of the unmanned aviation industry, I develop an account of Plains biopolitics, a regionally specific mode of governance that aims to keep a sufficiently vital settler population in place by fostering an economic milieu in which potential outmigrants can and do choose to stay. It is, I argue, the failure of settlement that haunts Plains biopolitics, marking efforts to retain and grow the region’s (non-Native) population as at once a bid to maintain settler dominance and an expression of sublimated anxiety about settlement’s fragility.
repository.rice.edu
December 16, 2025 at 1:06 AM
I was already feeling like this in 2018! I’m not following the space anymore, but interesting to hear that that’s still true.
brushing up on semi-recent academic lit on drones (theory and other non-technical areas) and it is amazing how so many people publishing on the subject are still extremely locked into a *massively* out-dated US-led War on Terror mode of thinking about drone tech
December 16, 2025 at 1:05 AM
Reposted by Marcel LaFlamme
this, from @kevinbaker.bsky.social, is a better analysis of the intersection between LLMs and academic science than 98% of what's out there.
Context Widows
or, of GPUs, LPUs, and Goal Displacement
artificialbureaucracy.substack.com
December 14, 2025 at 5:47 PM
With downward pressure on indirect costs at research institutions, some libraries are taking a closer look at direct charging to grant budgets for specialized services.

scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/12/08/g...
Guest Post — Funding Research Services: How Libraries are Exploring Cost Recovery Models - The Scholarly Kitchen
Today's guest bloggers share results of an exploratory survey of funding research services, offering a snapshot of a library community in transition.
scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org
December 9, 2025 at 3:35 PM
When we talk about how changes in the U.S. federal funding landscape will affect the future of scholarship, this has just become my Exhibit A.
The NSF Bio Anthro Program DDRIG, Cultural Anthrpology DDRIG, and Archaeology DDRIG have all been archived (as of yesterday afternoon). Please speak with your grad students and plan accordingly. To say I am angry and depressed about this is an understatement.
November 28, 2025 at 12:22 PM
Reposted by Marcel LaFlamme
📢 Excited to share that COS has been awarded a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to develop a community-driven strategic plan for ensuring long-term preservation, accessibility, and usability of federally-funded scientific data.

📰 Read more:
Center for Open Science Awarded Grant from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to Preserve and Safeguard Publicly Funded Scientific Data
The Center for Open Science (COS) was awarded a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to develop a community-driven strategic plan for ensuring long-term preservation, accessibility, and usability of federally-funded scientific data.
www.cos.io
November 17, 2025 at 9:00 PM
Finding that a study can't be reproduced is just the beginning of exploring the "variable space" that might explain why.

issues.org/confidence-s...
Build Confidence in Science by Embracing Uncertainty Rather Than Chasing Reproducibility
Despite calls to fund reproducibility studies, resources would be better spent on developing tools that help researchers assess uncertainty.
issues.org
November 9, 2025 at 1:11 PM
An article I'm thinking with about how research libraries can support engaged scholarship and societal impact: what would it mean to lean into place, rather than a research ecosystem that's implicitly elsewhere and everywhere?

journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jc...
Re-Localizing the Library | Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies
journals.litwinbooks.com
November 6, 2025 at 4:29 PM
I loved this piece on the organizational infrastructure of Sacred Harp singings. Did it all seem natural, effervescent? Systems and collective labor did that.

www.greyledger.org/the-architec...
The Architecture of the Hollow Square
How Volunteers Make Sacred Harp Singing Possible When hundreds of singers gathered at the Laurelhurst Club in Southeast Portland for the 34th Pacific Northwest Sacred Harp Singing Convention in mid-O...
www.greyledger.org
November 5, 2025 at 11:27 AM
Here's the latest installment of my newsletter for @arl.org, which aims to provide library leaders with intelligence and insight on the research environment. You can also subscribe if you'd like future issues to show up in your inbox.

www.arl.org/our-prioriti...
Fall 2025 — Association of Research Libraries
Subscribe to the email version of the ARL Monitor. ARL Monitor: Public Edition (Fall 2025) In the Government Affairs section of this issue, research funding on either side of the 49th parallel gets...
www.arl.org
November 4, 2025 at 5:56 PM
Filling my cup today with Jan Morris's remembrance of Trieste, where I stopped off en route to Ljubljana twenty years ago this month 🧳
October 13, 2025 at 2:28 PM
Reposted by Marcel LaFlamme
The latest post in our #ARLRepertoires series by @marcellaflamme.bsky.social looks to Clay Spinuzzi’s book Triangles and Tribulations for insight on why social scientists continue to look to theory in an age of data-intensive scholarship. bit.ly/RepTheory
@mitpress.bsky.social @cossa.bsky.social
Repertoires: How Social Science Theory Gets Made and Remade — Association of Research Libraries
In 2008, technologist Chris Anderson famously predicted the end of theory, as massively abundant data reduced the need for researchers to develop and test explanatory models. “Who knows why people...
bit.ly
October 2, 2025 at 5:38 PM
Very cool, I hadn't seen this! I'm thinking specifically about checks that happen prior to peer review (i.e., do we want this on our preprint server?), although in practice it may be hard to draw a bright line between those checks and review itself.
September 26, 2025 at 2:54 PM
Do we need a server/publisher-agnostic taxonomy of these checks, so that authors and readers can see at a glance which services do what (and, potentially, how well)?

I can see research libraries having a stake in this: we're talking trust indicators at the @arl.org Fall Meeting the week after next.
September 26, 2025 at 2:30 PM
Glimmer of insight: is one reason departments resist research assessment reform because faculty governance and researcher autonomy are being eroded on so many other fronts?
September 24, 2025 at 2:19 PM