Tim Elfenbein
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timelfen.bsky.social
Tim Elfenbein
@timelfen.bsky.social
1.5K followers 1.2K following 3.9K posts
Principal of Forthcoming LLC, a publishing consultancy; Member of @limnpress.bsky.social editorial collective; Researcher & practitioner of scholarly publishing; Digital explorer–analog sailor; @timelfen@assemblag.es on Mastodon; Victim of meaning.
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timelfen.bsky.social
Saint Martin notes #14
End of WhatsApp exchange: “Thank you.” “U welcome”
October 30, 2025 at 5:19 PM
timelfen.bsky.social
Saint Martin notes: #13
TV screen at Pollos Hermanos with a picture of four milkshakes and the words, “BEST MILKSHAKES, IT’S ALL ABOUT CHICKEN.” The TV sits on a wall above an unlit neon sign of Bryan Cranston as Walter White as Heisenberg over the words, “Let’s cook.”
October 29, 2025 at 11:26 PM
timelfen.bsky.social
Correctly parsing institutions, matching them to RORs, & linking to author profiles is hard, I get it. The corrective measures OpenAlex has are inadequate (I can't fix the errors in my profile).

What frustrate are the assumptions built into the system, & for perverse purposes: rankings.
Option 1 for correcting an incorrect institutional affiliation: help improve the AI techniques OpenAlex uses to parse institutions. So I can help with missing or inaccurate parsing and linking to my author profile, but the issue here, removal of inaccurate (all) links. "Improve the automatic detections made by AI "AI techniques are used on a large scale to analyse bibliographic corpora. In particular, OpenAlex uses them to construct affiliation links in publications (used for the Leiden ranking) and Grobid-Softcite to detect mentions of data and software in the full text. Helping to correct these data improves the reliability and representativeness of these analyses." Option 2 for correcting author profile, a list of four editorial actions OpenAlex staff can take. They don't include changing author institutional affiliations. "What edit is needed to the author profile? * Change the display name * Merge another profile into mine * Remove works from my profile *Add works to my profile"
October 27, 2025 at 5:00 PM
timelfen.bsky.social
Part of the issue is that OpenAlex is harvesting & parsing metadata from existing works & the assumption seems to be author of a work *must* have an institutional affiliation. So when I co-author a piece & they can't identify an affiliation for me, they apply my co-author's affiliations.
Author info from one of the works indexed by OpenAlex. "Timothy Elfenbein, principal of Forthcoming LLC, a publishing consultancy in Madison, WI, has worked with Duke University Press, the Society for Cultural Anthropology, COPIM, and scholar-led journals. His research focuses on publishing infrastructure and evolving knowledge production practices. Email: timelf@gmail.com. Andrew S. Hoffman, a Service Scientist in Research Data Management at Leiden University's Faculty of Social Sciences (CADS & CWTS), supports researchers in – and conducts research on the possibilities for – open science practices, with a focus on developing novel policy and infrastructure that bolsters human connection and epistemic diversity. Email: a.s.hoffman@fsw.leidenuniv.nl." OpenAlex accurately extracts my co-author's institution (Leiden University), inaccurate assign his job title to an institution (Data Management (Italy)), then inaccurately assigns those institutional affiliations to me. OpenAlex metadata for work: "Source: Anthropology Today Authors: Timothy W. Elfenbein, Andrew Hoffman Institutions: Data Management (Italy), Leiden University"
October 27, 2025 at 5:00 PM