Peter Suber has asked, following a long chain of thinking about knowledge as a non-rivalrous form that is inscribed, historically, within rivalrous forms: Digital texts are often considered non-rivalrous.

2016 was a year of mixed fortune for me. On the positive side, OLH continues to grow, I was made a (full) Professor, and I published two books. On the downside, I was seriously ill, suffering a stroke linked to vasculitis in March, from which I have made a near-full recovery. I’ve enjoyed working with my PhD students, though, and am looking forward to a less eventful 2017!

Annotation tools on the web are somewhat fragile. They depend upon complex XPath queries and other anchoring technologies to ensure that annotations are keyed to known positions. The problem is that often, even where content is stable in one sense (e.g. in an academic journal article), redesigns of the page itself can lead to serious problems for annotation keying. This creates orphan annotations.

The internal draft of the Consultation on the Second Research Excellence Framework that was requested by FOI last February contained the following clause: The proposal for 5*s of grading has been quietly dropped from the final consultation. This seems odd. Panels last time seemed to want further levels of detail (to make the exercise more sensitive/discriminatory in its judgements). This wasn’t in Stern.

HEFCE has today released its Consultation on the Second Research Excellence Framework after a year of delays in light of the Stern Review and now modified from the previous internal draft. In true “hot-take” style up-to-the-minute policy reading, I’ve done a quick first read through of the document and wanted to note some aspects. Note that these are mostly all open to revision in light of feedback to the consultation.

In his recent piece for WonkHE, Chris Husbands, the chair of the TEF panel, wrote in order to “bust” five myths about the TEF. Identifying these as “punishing widening participation”, a “metrics-only” approach, the weakness of the “provider statement”, “pre-ordained outputs”, and an exclusion of the “student view”, Husbands goes some distance to allaying a few fears.

Today, along with Stuart Lawson and Jon Tennant, I have submitted the below as a complaint to the Competition and Markets Authority, making good on the advice of Ann McKechin, MP at the BIS Inquiry into Open Access in 2013. The document is also available as a PDF.

The most frequent question that is asked in scholarly communication circles about gold open access is whether a business model is sustainable and/or scalable. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that we are talking about publishing the exact same quantity of material as we are under a subscription model, here’s what that means: Does the model distribute costs in a way that makes it affordable to the actors who pay?

I just wanted to share some of the work I’ve been doing on one of my next book project, which is provisionally entitled The Aesthetics of Metadata: Redaction, Reference, & the Archive in Contemporary Fiction . I have roughly 45,000 words of the project down now (of a projected 90,000-word extent) and I also have an emergent structure.

I’m here at the Kansas University conference on “Envisioning a world beyond Article/Book Processing Charges”. One of the first things we were asked to do was a two-minute lightning talk on what we don’t yet know about a world beyond APCs. I thought that I would share my questions here, for posterity: In removing APCs, how do we keep the visibility of labour?