Last week, I was contacted by Elizabeth Gibney, who writes for the Times Higher, with a request for comment on the recent Science-Metrix report, and particularly their findings that papers that were OA had higher citation rates, but gold was not as high as green. Elizabeth has very kindly included some of my response in her article, but I wanted to share my full response below.

Yesterday evening I received a letter from my MP. I reproduce it below, with my response. This is the democracy that we do not want. My response: The Democracy We Do Not Want was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on August 28, 2013.

So, in conjunction with the amazing people at South End Press -- a group of people unsurpassed in my esteem -- I'm proud to be part of a proposal for the SXSW conference this year. However, we need you to VOTE FOR OUR PANEL at PanelPicker. Please do this. It takes 2 minutes. What are we planning to talk about? How has digital publishing affected small independent presses? Are small independent presses suffering and why?

There’s been some discussion of prescriptivism on various linguistics blogs lately (Kory Stamper has links). The prescriptivism in question is definitely annoying, but I think everyone misses the mark a bit.

This week I had the privilege of visiting Japan for the first time to speak with SPARC Japan (in Tokyo) about developments in open access for the humanities. A few interesting points on an OA-front came out of this that are worth sharing for those (much like myself) who primarily operate within an Anglo-American context; I learned a great deal. Firstly, many commentators in Tokyo voiced the argument-by-elitism in slightly different form.

Just So stories were named by Rudyard Kipling in his book of the same name, which contained stories like “How the Rhinoceros Got his Skin.” In that one, the rhino’s skin starts out tight, but after he takes it off to swim, a man put crumbs in it to take revenge for the rhino eating his cake. When the rhino put his skin back on, it itched so much he loosened it up with all his scratching.

My two spheres of interest -- difficult works of English literature and computer programming (OK, scholarly communications and publishing, also. OK, there are lots more spheres of interest) -- only intersect occasionally. However, in recent days I have been toying with the idea of using git to version control my writing.

Last week saw the descent of some sixty Pynchon scholars upon the small northern city of Durham in the UK. The occasion was the International Pynchon Week conference, this year a co-sponsored event between the University of Durham and the University of Lincoln. The event was organised primarily by Samuel Thomas, of Durham, while I had assisted with various aspects of promotion, web design and suchlike.

I realized today that I hadn’t yet blogged about my dissertation, the Spread of Change in French Negation . That’s too bad, because I like my dissertation topic. It’s fun, and it’s interesting. You may see here, from time to time, posts about my dissertation research. I’ll try to make them accessible to anyone, not just the specialized audience that I wrote the dissertation for.

While I agree with much of what they say, in a post on the LSE Impact Blog, Meera Sabaratnam and Paul Kirby write, of the latest round of HEFCE consultations on OA for a post-2014 REF: This isn't how I read the proposed document at all.