HEFCE has today released its [Consultation on the Second Research Excellence Framework](http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/year/2016/201636/) after a year of delays in light of the Stern Review and now modified from the [previous internal draft](https://www.martineve.com/2016/02/18/REF-consultation/). 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.

In his [recent piece for WonkHE](http://wonkhe.com/blogs/busting-five-common-myths-about-the-tef/), 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 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: 1. 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: 1. In removing APCs, how do we keep the visibility of labour?

A fragment of thought: The single largest challenge for the future of information publishing will be to find markers or frames that can accurately denote quality or truth at the level of the article or book (or other form) while still benefiting from the abundance of dissemination that the digital space can offer.

An email I received today about [one of my open-access articles](http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.82): > Dear Sir, > > My name is ____________. I’m a regular 22 year old in the UK, university-educated and owner of a soon-to-be coffee shop. Please forgive this email if it does not make sense, especially considering I am well into a bottle of whisky at 5am. > > I am a huge fan of the novel Cloud Atlas.

As a result of a discussion today, I thought it worth writing out some of my observations/thoughts on a few of the arguments, counter-arguments, and political alignments for and against open access. What, in other words, is the scope of OA? Should it be for work for which authors cannot reasonably expect to make a remuneration by direct sales alone?

I am extremely pleased to say that my latest peer-reviewed book, _Literature Against Criticism: University English and Contemporary Fiction in Conflict_ has today been published by Open Book Publishers!

I can say, without a shred of doubt, that my experience with Open Book Publishers has been nothing short of excellent. For reference/comparison: I've published three other books with Cambridge UP, Bloomsbury and Palgrave. In all respects, OBP were at least as good, if not better in some areas, than some of the others.