Gabriel Stein

Learn how to write a "public abstract" – a version of your paper or a paper in your field geared towards mass audiences

Moving from brand to process-based indicators of document quality.

Elements and governance.

Tuesday, May 19 @ 1pm EDT. Recording now available.

This document briefly describes the most common forms of analytics tools in use in both traditional digital publishing and academic publishing, with an emphasis on what they are designed to measure and what goals they are designed to serve.

Presented during the Open Publishing Fest, this resource focuses on the thinking behind the development of PubPub and showcases the platform's new dashboard.

Anyone who contributes a minimum of $5/month, regardless of plan, can give their community a custom domain.

The output of the project will include a specification for representing editorial events as Doc Maps, implementation guides for publishers and technology providers, and a roadmap for future development of a Doc Maps ecosystem, including aggregation and discovery services.

An experiment in creating a diverse, authoritative, auto-generating news source for the post-truth era.

And “we’re just following the data” is a bad argument, anyway

Warning: Some Collaboration Required

And how you can do the same right now

Savor your newspaper. This is what it feels like when it’s gone.

The dominant commercial models in scholarly publishing aren’t serving the academy or humanity well — extracting enormous profits from a mostly publicly-funded endeavor. But we have a window to stand up and support an alternative.

The great intertwining continues.

Reality is too full.

The problem with impact algorithms isn't that they exist, but that when they dominate, they coerce others into conforming to shapes designed to satisfy profit-driven needs rather than the community's needs.

We need to talk about the low end of GPT-3, too.

Everything is fine.

I would rather live in the present than give myself a second job hunting for better returns. But if you do get crazy rich on crypto, please consider inviting me to your yacht parties. You can make fun of me for this post.

America's cult of individualism is being put to the test in the fight for digital rights.

Important bread vs. beer update! It might matter quite a bit if alcohol came first. Seriously.

New-York's forgotten hyphen obscures a shameful legacy and serves as a timely reminder of the power of erasure.

Did science communicators learn nothing from the CDC's early mask mess-up? By refusing to even acknowledge good-faith questions about the virus's origin, we risk repeating the mistake and driving skeptics further to the fringes.

The problems with research and publishing can't be solved if the business model doesn't change. It's unfortunate to see lots of otherwise good work ignore this fundamental issue.

It’s tempting to think of conspiracy theorists as uneducated, unintelligent, insane, or bad-faith actors. But we’re increasingly finding that the inverse is often true.

I think I finally understand crypto (and a few other things), and it's not...great.

My letter to @SenSchumer today. Send one to your Senator now.

Ok, here's a much simpler take on the 'Great Online Game': it's all just advanced tax avoidance.

Deep history offers a tantalizing mission for technologists brave enough to adopt it: rebuild the egalitarian, cooperative communities that were our species' norm until very recently.

I just judged an NYC middle school debate tournament and...wow. The kids really are alright.

At first, I thought Imperfect Foods was a perfect fit for my lifestyle, wallet, and morals. Then I remembered they're a VC-funded startup.

I've been trying to write every day, but today I failed. Sort of. Here's why, maybe?

I took a debate judge approach to figuring out who to vote for, and I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.

My mayoral rankings were both quite easy — there are two clear top choices — and very hard between those two. Thanks to ranked choice voting, though, I can give both a shot to win.

I didn't have much time to write today, so here's just a quick note on the machine and the experience of voting in my first ranked-choice election.

We need to come to terms with the fact that the information age is basically a giant uncontrolled experiment.

I'm heading on vacation, and won't be posting much here most likely. But here's a parting thought about the need for breaks.

Research abstracts have changed a lot since they first appeared two centuries ago. It might be time to re-evaluate them.

Welp, we're trying the four-day workweek. Here's how, why, and how we'll be gauging success.

A blistering takedown of cryptocurrencies leads to an exceptionally dark thought: what if crypto is a self-perpetuating trauma machine?

A very Friday response to a very bad Medium marketing tweet.

Is there a meaningful praxis for socialist-leaning tech workers?

Primal screaming at the new space race. [warning: profanity]

About a month ago we switched to a 4-day, 8 hour per day workweek. Here are some reflections from the first few weeks.

What if your todo list is part of a distributed, unsupervised task management app that's running your company without anyone realizing it?

There's only one search result for 'marxist' on PornHub.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, eLife/Sciety, EMBO and Knowledge Futures to pilot the DocMaps framework in community preprint reviews and evaluations

Maybe the people who are trying to understand why conspiracies take root online are themselves part of a giant conspiracy to prop up the online advertising economy. Personally, I think the truth might be weirder and a bit less nihilistic.

Let's talk when the metaverse can directly feed the hungry, house people, or remove carbon from the atmosphere.

The 'solar' in solarpunk is both a literal reference to renewable energy and a metaphor for decentralized, locally controlled, but interconnected resilience.

My favorites so far. Extremely incomplete!

Nothing to see here, just Nature totally slipping into the business of curating preprints.

The dark, moody undertones of Chris Hayes' piece on internet fame go nicely with the bright, yet restrained optimism of Stasavage and Schneider's application of early democracies to the internet.

Is sourdough goyish? A personal essay.

Modern e-commerce is pathological; an example.

What happens to religion in a Utopia?

And how you can do the same right now

Make them pay.

Cities are our future. Help make yours better.

Last winter, I experimented with a new method of newsgathering and presentation using the conversation startup Branch. This is the post-mortem.

What I’m telling my reps in today’s calls

Ask for a bipartisan investigation into Trump’s finances

I’m taking a detour from fiction to write about the debate again. Sorry, can’t help it.

Sorry for that insipid headline, but hey, it got you here.

A modest fake news proposal for Facebook. We should consider whether platforms like Facebook have an obligation to train their users on how to effectively use their platform.

If you live in one of these states, get ready to call.

It’s fast and easy. Here’s how.