Studies such as my Warez book fall under the rubric of ‘netnographies’; work that attempt to examine ethnographically the principles and characteristics of various online cultures. A fundamental challenge of working in this space is the issue of ethics, though. Most of the documents and conversations that have been surfaced in the DeFacto2 archive were thought, by the conversation participants, to have been held in private.

I have other things to do but one day I’ll enlarge on the insidious effects of elevating this cursed little histogram of “Research output per year” as the single most important bit of information about academics at thousands of universities that use Elsevier Pure. Consider this mini-rant my notes for that occasion. Most importantly, we DO NOT write per year. Our careers are too diverse and precarious to measure output that way.

With Times Higher Education writing about citation gaming and hyperprolific authors (surely not unrelated) I hope we can save some of our attention for what Uta Frith and others have called slow science.

As part of my efforts on Work Package 3 of the COPIM project I am engaged in a project that seeks to convert publishers to business models that will allow them to publish their books openly, without using unaffordable book processing charges (which authors hate and which will not scale). I am pleased to say that, as of today, we can announce the first press to take the leap: the Central European University Press.

After a Herculean effort, coinciding with open access week 2020, our edited volume Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access has now been published by The MIT Press. It's available both in print to purchase and as a CC BY open-access download. I wanted to take this opportunity to write a few words about the goals of the volume, which speak to my interests in open access.

I am, at present, working on a book currently entitled Warez: The Economic Artforms and Illicit Crafts of the Topsite Scene , under contract with punctum books. The title has changed since it went under contract in order to better reflect the content – and it might well change again.

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 calling for the retraction of Mead, Lawrence M., ‘Poverty and Culture’, Society, 2020 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-020-00496-1. 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 article before signing the petition.

There’s an article out today in Research Fortnight detailing some of the frustrations 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.