Who do you think was responsible for the monumental failure of judgement that ended with Toby Young being appointed to a regulatory body for HE in the UK, the so-called but misnamed “Office for Students”? You’d think that it would be impossible that anybody actually ran a recruitment panel that would come to such a conclusion, but the Department for Education got back to me today on my Freedom of Information request to provide answers to my

Let’s assume that we have a Learned Society that fulfills the following conditions: The society wants to move to an OA model for the good of disciplinary dissemination. The society has an existing subscription base. The society can take a hit of 3% on its subscription revenue. The society can handle a 90% renewal rate alongside the 3% hit.

I am frequently asked, by libraries, to provide usage statistics for their institutions at the Open Library of Humanities. I usually resist this, since there are a number of ways in which the metrics are not usually a fair comparison to subscription resources. A few notes on this. We do not have or require any login information. This means that the only way that we can provide usage information is by using the institutional IP address.

2017 was, as with last year, a mixed bag for me. On the positive side, OLH continues to grow, I received a grant for the peer-review project on which I am working, we released Janeway the scholarly communcations platform, and I had a number of publications out. Password was published in Korean and I am about to sign a book contract for my next monograph.

This is partly a therapeutic post to get this off my chest and partly a post to which I can point friends and colleagues to avoid re-explaining everything every time. Since mid-September 2017, when I had pneumonia, sepsis, and a spinal-column infection, I have been losing my hearing. It varies hugely as to how bad this is from day to day.

I’m currently handling a difficult case where a poetry publisher is demanding a royalty for citation of text within a work of literary criticism. They want to know how many “copies” we are “printing” so they can charge us. It is my view that this is totally extortionate and that this use is “fair dealing” under UK law for purposes of criticism and review.

The recent self-censorship by Cambridge University Press in China is billed, by some, as an assault on academic freedom. It is certainly a worrying trend. There are, though, a couple of responses that I wanted to note about this: Following David Price, I note that making material open access with an open license allows for the free, open, online dissemination of scholarly work.

I have a letter in today’s Times Higher Education repying to Marilyn Deegan on open-access books. The full, unedited version of the letter is in my institutional repository or below. Dear Sir, In her ‘Open access monograph dash could lead us off a cliff’ (Times Higher, 27th July 2017), Marilyn Deegan attacks a series of straw arguments about open access for books that have little basis in policy reality.

There has been a lot of angst about the newly proposed non-portability requirements for REF2021 and beyond, particularly from ECRs. I want to say upfront that I do not want to disparage such worries; I speak from a position of privilege, having a permanent position even though I am, by RCUK standards, myself an Early-Career Researcher. I do, though, want to set out why I think these fears are misplaced/over-blown.

Last week I attended the rather enjoyable English: Shared Futures conference and participated in a panel titled “How to Get Published as an Early Career Academic”. This was a worthwhile thing to do, although it’s a shame we need this.