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University of Nowhere: London

2025 October 19 Sunday 15:25

Travelling around the metropolis, it is always a surprise to encounter the latest "London" university. The most recent, 'University of Staffordshire: London' (there is nearly always a colon!) was the latest laugh to inspire this post and prompted a list of those seen so far (in no particular order):

They seem to specialise in offering those low-cost courses in business, management, e-sports , etc.; a wry smile at the absence of engineering, sciences, health. As far as the international market is concerned, London is UK.

AI assistance article retrieval

On a typical rain-sodden afternoon, is an opportunity to read some research articles of personal interest. Since preference is to read in pdf, it is often found easier to access said format via the doi as the url suffix to a well-known "shadow library". Then the thought arose, to combine such a resource with an artificial intelligence service.
elsevier web page with cloudflare script blocked and hence prevention to accept journal article due to request to verify as human Such use of ai revealed a series of observations about a notorious legacy publisher. Perhaps accidental, but assumed deliberate is the apparent failure to assign identifiers: according to a certain 'general language model':

uncovered a significant and widespread metadata error from the publisher, Elsevier...several DOIs have been incorrectly assigned to the wrong articles in the official registration systems (like Crossref), which then propagates the error to Google Scholar, Scopus, and other databases...The article ... has had its DOI lost or swapped in this system-wide error...a major publishing error that is affecting many researchers
 cloudflare script blocked and hence access to researchgate due to request to verify as human Similarly to other legacy businesses threatened by development of non-proprietary, anti- mono/duo/oligopolistic services, it would seem that a certain publisher seeks to break the digital identification system.