Today I have written to the University of Leicester tendering my resignation as an external examiner. The text of resignation is below: Dear Professor Canagarajah, I write, following my previous correspondence of the 22nd January, to tender my resignation as an external examiner in the department of English at the University of Leicester. I wish to reiterate the concerns that I made in that email, to which I have had no response.
This morning I had to have a call with our accountants that I was somewhat dreading: does Brexit have tax implications for the Open Library of Humanities, a company limited by guarantee with charitable objects (a UK charity)? An important point about our model: OLH is not a supply.
This week opened with the distressing news that Lord Sumption, supposedly someone whose judgement is entirely sound, having been a Supreme Court justice, had told a cancer sufferer live on air that her life was less valuable than others. Pretty disgusting stuff that, to me, seems to show a type of thinking that is similar to eugenics;
I am due up for vaccination in the very near future. This is good news. But it’s tempered.
A discourse of ‘fairness’ has emerged in open-access circles in recent years. It has come from a sense that big, for-profit publishers have not played ‘fairly’ with libraries over the past 30 years. It is unsurprising. These large publishers make margins of 35%+ on billions of dollars of revenue, even while library budgets stagnate.
There was some research earlier this year that I thought was apt for the pandemic, showing that realism is key to being happy, not optimism or pessimism.
I have, today, submitted the manuscript of my book, currently titled Warez: The Economic Aesthetics and Alternative Reality Games of the Topsite Scene to the publisher!
On the same day as I submitted my next book manuscript, I am pleased to be able to say that Reading Peer Review, my 7 th academic book, has been published by Cambridge University Press. The book is open access and available at CUP or in BIROn. Here’s the blurb: How do you change the world of academia and what insight can peer review provide into this question?
I usually start my New Year’s resolutions on the 28 th or 29 th December. I do this because I don’t like the season of excess; I come out of it feeling unfit, bloated, unstructured etc. Last year’s resolutions went somewhat down the pan as the pandemic blew everything away. This year, I have some personal goals: I put on 7kg during the pandemic. I want to lose this. I will achieve this by upping my exercise.
My Ph.D. supervisors were not particularly hands on. This was not slacking on their part – it suited me just fine and they could see that I had the thesis project in hand. There was a lesson from one of my supervisors that I will never forget, though. I was writing my first conference paper proposal/abstract. I felt it wasn’t quite right and asked for his advice.
