HEFCE, the precursor to Research England, announced in 2016 that “we intend to move towards an open-access requirement for monographs in the exercise that follows the next REF (expected in the mid-2020s).” This was published in 2016 as, “[g]iven the length of time required to produce and publish monographs,” HEFCE wished “to give due notice to the sector” by “signalling this now”. It is now two years since that signal was given and, to be

Some open-access advocates argue that transparency and accountability are key for open access (meaning: the removal of price and permission barriers to reading academic research). Indeed, this is one of the many points when the discourses of neoliberal* governmentality intersect with open academic publication.

I’m very pleased to be able to announce some forthcoming titles in the Bloomsbury New Horizons in Contemporary Writing series that I edit! Dates are, of course, subject to change but we have a really exciting line up of titles coming soon!

A few years ago I wrote an article: Eve, Martin Paul, ‘Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and the Problems of “Metamodernism”: Post-Millennial Post-Postmodernism?’, C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings , 1 (2012), 7–25. It was the first thing I wrote outside of my Ph.D. and I am not sure that the literary analysis is that good. I wouldn’t read the second half of it if I were you.

In the past few days I have spoken with many colleagues with differing views on the offer from UUK. Like many other colleagues, I have been on strike to halt the conversion of the defined benefit pension of the Universities Superannuation Scheme to a market-performance-based defined contribution system. It has been heartening to see so many colleagues involved in industrial action and to see that labour has power in such disputes.

In the past few days, well over a year since HEFCE signalled its “inten[tion] to move towards an open-access requirement for monographs in the exercise that follows the next REF (expected in the mid-2020s)”, humanities academics have been getting themselves stirred up on the basis of a document issued by the Royal Historical Society. It is curious that it is only now that people are paying any attention to this.

I’ve just been reading the EC’s tender document for their new open-access platform. Everyone thinks that it’s a shoo-in for F1000. But quite frankly, good luck to whoever gets it. Some comments: Just noting that the clear “Brexit advantage” is showing here. Thanks to my fellow country-people for this. OK, wait, what? This is a higher uptime requirement than achieved by Amazon.

A lot of the social media posts that I’ve seen recently about the UCU’s call for “Action Short of a Strike” (ASOS) are fixated on the idea that everyone’s contract stipulates that they will work from 9 in the morning until 5 (or 6) in the afternoon and that one should not work outside these hours. One should not send email, either, apparently outside these hours. For instance, UCU Kent Branch said: “ASOS needs to be effective.

I have a Keith McMillen K-Mix audio device that I use for music-making. I noticed, though, that if you have a simple stereo setup on this, with, say, monitors plugged into outputs 1 and 2 (the master outs) then you basically lose a huge amount of bass response on Linux. I confirmed this trying it on Windows and Linux and, in Linux, the bass is totally missing. In fact, the sound is weak.

Thinking aloud. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is undoubtedly a good idea, in my view. The thrust of the declaration states that research should only be assessed at the unit level, rather than at the level of the journal/venue. Certainly, I wish DORA was better worded to include more strongly disciplines where the specific measure of Impact Factor isn’t used (though it disavows “journal-based metrics” more widely).