This was, in many ways, a pretty bad year for me. My health has, to be frank, been appalling once more. It has necessitated treatment with cyclophosphamide in hospital, a chemotherapy agent that makes you feel very unwell and leaves your immune system vulnerable to every vulturous bug under the sun.
I am quoted in today’s Research Fortnight on the new REF staff/individual circumstances under the heading ‘REF staff circumstances rules criticised’. The quote used only gives a selection of the views that I supplied and omits the bits where I say why the new situation might be better (that’s fine – it’s journalism and I was not quoted inaccurately). Here are my full remarks in context: What are you personal experiences of REF staff
It is often assumed that researchers submit their work to the highest prestige titles and, when rejected, move down the ‘hierarchy’ to titles with less stringent review criteria (see, for instance, Poynder, Richard, ‘PLoS ONE, Open Access, and the Future of Scholarly Publishing’, 2011, https://richardpoynder.co.uk/PLoS_ONE.pdf, p. 29). The irony is that at each stage of this process the paper may be revised and rewritten in the light of
Some time around 2016 I was invited by Kasia Boddy and David Winters to contribute to a special issue of Critical Quarterly that they were putting together. The issue was centred on notions of authorship in the digital age. This came at an opportune time as I had been playing with training a recurrent neural network on the back corpus of the literary studies journal, Textual Practice , and had some promising results.
One of the earliest articles that I wrote during the final year of my Ph.D. was for the journal C21 , published by Gylphi. The article is quite hard to track down now as the online presence is being reworked and the front-list has moved to the Open Library of Humanities. I had no funding for gold open access at that time, nor did the publisher have a green arrangement in place.
The most recent Royal Historical Society document on Plan S says the following about the Open Library of Humanities (OLH): “It fails, however, to reference or explore the funding base that has made these important initiatives both possible and (to date) sustainable.
Last week, while I was having blood products transfused at the Royal Free Hospital, I received an email from the Leverhulme Trust stating that I had been awarded the 2019 Philip Leverhulme Trust Prize in Literary Studies.
From around 2010 to 2013 I was on a drug called Rituximab to control my autoimmune conditions (rheumatoid arthritis and vasculitis). This highly effective medication targets b-cells and destroys autoimmune responses by disabling parts of the immune system. After a few years of treatment, though, my immunoglobulin levels were extremely low and it was decided that Rituximab was no longer safe for me. I was moved to tocilizumab.
A Learned Society spoke to me last week about what they could do to move to an open-access model. They currently receive about 100,000 EUR per year from their subscription/hybrid-OA publisher but were willing to jettison this (!) if they could go OA with no author fees. The problem was that implementing a new business model was a total pain.
After last week’s post on APCs, some further musings. Following Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s work on generous thinking and the importance of community for the academy, I was advocating for the importance of the mission-driven nature of the publishers that we choose infrastructurally to support. Imagine a scenario, though: a for-profit publisher makes 37% profit.
