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.

What would the world be like if Zuck had paid attention to his Facebook comments and read David Graeber?

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

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.

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.

Is sourdough goyish? A personal essay.

What happens to religion in a Utopia?

It's weird to write a piece about innovation stagnation and not really mention wealth inequality.

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.

Learn about the latest Docmaps developments from our OPF webinar.

Modern e-commerce is pathological; an example.

My favorites so far. Extremely incomplete!

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

Will replacing the attention economy with a speculation economy really more fairly distribute power?

And how you can do the same right now

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

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

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

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.

It’s fast and easy. Here’s how.

Cities are our future. Help make yours better.

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

Ask for a bipartisan investigation into Trump’s finances

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

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.

Make them pay.

And how you can do the same right now

The birthday present I'm asking for: dig deep into your energy reserves and make some noise for democracy this week and next.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

Is not having to think about how your sewage gets disposed of worth submitting to the rule of the state?

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.

Applications Closed. Help build better futures for open academic publishing with a thoughtfully remote, 4-day workweek, mission-driven team. | Remote, full-time, $70,000 - $80,000 per year plus benefits, depending on experience

So much for the daily blogging habit. Here's a lazy list of things on my mind: accessing money in academia, getting off Google, and the fog of identity and war.

Why is it so hard to name the primary forces driving democratic backsliding?

Have they considered not being so repressed?

Is a new kind of politics possible?

A brief thought on the virus, CDC guidelines, and #scicomm.

For my disaffected friends: facing this moment requires embracing conflicting paradigms.