A coalition of funders from across Europe has proposed a bold initiative, called Plan S, to push towards OA for 2020. It includes the following 10 points: Authors retain copyright of their publication with no restrictions. All publications must be published under an open license, preferably the Creative Commons Attribution Licence CC BY. In all cases, the license applied should fulfil the requirements defined by the Berlin Declaration;

I started writing this post back in August, and I hurried it a little because of a Limping Chicken article guest written by researchers at the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre at University College London. I’ve known the DCAL folks for years, and they graciously acknowledged some of my previous writings on this issue.

As you may know, the Centre for Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck publishes and maintains a piece of open-source software for journal publishing called Janeway. This software is licensed under the AGPLv3. We chose this license for several reasons, but the most important was that we wanted strong CopyLeft protection, including for server-side usage, on this software.

I spent some time this morning trying to work out why my CPU - the beastly Intel i9 7980XE - was capped at 2.6ghz when the BIOS allows scaling to 4.3ghz. When I ran the usually suggested cpufreq and cpupower commands, I received: “no or unknown cpufreq driver is active on this CPU”. The reason for this was that you need, in the UEFI/BIOS, to enable: Intel Enhanced SpeedStep and the option to expose pstates.

Even as worldwide militaries develop autonomous killer robots, when we think of the ethics of AI, we often turn to the Asimov principles: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

HEFCE, the precursor to Research England, announced in 2016 that “we intend to move towards an open-access requirement for monographs in the exercise that follows the next REF (expected in the mid-2020s).” This was published in 2016 as, “[g]iven the length of time required to produce and publish monographs,” HEFCE wished “to give due notice to the sector” by “signalling this now”. It is now two years since that signal was given and, to be

Some open-access advocates argue that transparency and accountability are key for open access (meaning: the removal of price and permission barriers to reading academic research). Indeed, this is one of the many points when the discourses of neoliberal* governmentality intersect with open academic publication.

I’m very pleased to be able to announce some forthcoming titles in the Bloomsbury New Horizons in Contemporary Writing series that I edit! Dates are, of course, subject to change but we have a really exciting line up of titles coming soon!

I’ve written in the past about instrumentalism, the scientific practice of treating theories as tools that can be evaluated by their usefulness, rather than as claims that can be evaluated as true or false. If you haven’t tried this way of looking at science, I highly recommend it! But if theories are tools, what are they used for? What makes a theory more or less useful?

A few years ago I wrote an article: Eve, Martin Paul, ‘Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and the Problems of “Metamodernism”: Post-Millennial Post-Postmodernism?’, C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings , 1 (2012), 7–25. It was the first thing I wrote outside of my Ph.D. and I am not sure that the literary analysis is that good. I wouldn’t read the second half of it if I were you.