Today, in the _Observer_, the Sunday national newspaper of the liberal Guardian Media Group, Will Hutton offered a sobering retrospective of the university crisis during the Covid pandemic, from his position as the former principal of Hertford College, Oxford.

A journalist recently asked me for a comment on why I, as an academic who studies academic publishing, signed [a petition](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nwWTW2sNrkn9mwxtcUBcGVZL2x6hXv7FOX3P_3VgTLA/edit) calling for the retraction of Mead, Lawrence M., ‘Poverty and Culture’, Society, 2020 . I wanted to publish my full reasoning here ahead of any publication that might quote me. When I saw this petition circulating, I took time to read the

There's an article out today in Research Fortnight detailing [some of the frustrations](https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-research-councils-2020-8-applicants-to-ukri-covid-19-rapid-response-call-complain-of-delays/) that we had with a recent AHRC/UKRI grant proposal.

The pandemic is not over. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill just went back for a week of in-person term. Seven days later, they have shut down, with over 500 students in isolation. They can now offer only remote tuition. So I repeat to those who are being optimistic about this year: no, the pandemic is not over, it is far from over, and there are many many challenges ahead.

I recently participated in the American Historical Association's open peer review experiment on the manuscript of '[History Can Be Open Source](https://ahropenreview.com/HistoryCanBeOpenSource/)'. I enjoyed reading the manuscript and welcomed the experiment. I would like to offer some experiential observations on the meta-process, in the open. I've used CommentPress before, so the technology was familiar.

A note to self (and others) for when this problem happens again. My university today updated the certificate for their OWA webmail service, signed by a certificate authority that I did not have in my trust chain.

# Defining Threat Infrastructures ‘Threat infrastructures’ are platforms that are established or promised to be established solely or primarily in order to change the behavior of incumbent initiatives through fear. In recent years, such platforms have featured heavily in the scholarly communications landscape and have been driven primarily by funders pushing for open access.

Anyone who has followed the UK government's attitude to the sick and disabled over the past few years will be unsurprised by the way they are relaxing shielding in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

This week for COPIM we are reading Knöchelmann, Marcel, The Democratisation Myth: Open Access and the Solidification of Epistemic Injustices (SocArXiv, 9 June 2020) . This piece presents an argument that is familiar to me as it strongly mirrors the contents of the forthcoming Mboa Nkoudou, Thomas Hervé, ‘Epistemic Alienation in African Scholarly Communications: Open Access as a Pharmakon’, in _Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories,

OLH, obviously, has a business model for its open-access publishing. We operate due to a membership model in which approximately 300 libraries pay an annual fee so that we can exist and publish all our work openly.

Quite frankly, the current situation is terrifying. Another approximately 400 deaths today in the UK from the virus and the reproduction number (R) is said to be near to 1 (exponential infection rate). The UK has among the worst mortality rates in the world. But it's being portrayed as the right time to ease the lockdown.