There are lots of things that I have learned about kidneys and their functions since BK virus destroyed mine. Kidneys regulate potassium in your blood; they also control phosphate levels; they remove urea from the blood stream; they take excess fluid out of your body and blood; they produce the hormones that stimulate the creation of red blood cells; and a whole host more. Kidneys are the Swiss Army Knives of internal organs.

Research England has dropped the mandate for OA books in its guidance for the next REF, saying that it will, now, apply instead by 2029. It is hard to see, given the extensive trailing of this mandate, what will be different by 2029. We seem stuck in a doom loop whereby RE announces its policy decisions years in advance, but far from enough people systematically try to implement them until the last minute, by which time they say it was too late.

There’s a movement at the moment on social media where angry academic authors are gathering with the intent to boycott Routledge, who are apparently distributing academic works for training in AI. I say: read your publishing contracts. I believe that Routledge’s default agreement certainly allows this.

I am very pleased to say that my book, _Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History_, is out today!

It’s always frustrating to find errors in a work that has already gone to press/been through peer review, but unfortunately my friend Pete Christian has unearthed a few minor mistakes that I want to put out here. Thanks to Pete, who also says that none of this detail affects the overall argument of the text. On p. 154, I’ve made a mistake when quoting Hollander – he says (correctly) that “home” is a Germanic word.

Some remarks that will be presented at the SHARP plenary roundtable: AI in the Communications Circuit. Last week, the CEO of Microsoft’s AI division said, in an interview with CNBC, that “I think that with respect to content that’s already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the ‘90s has been that it is fair use.

A few personal notes on the clamour around OA for books (written from the perspective of an author of 10 books that are all openly accessible): The REF mandate for books has been argued and trialed over an eight-year period, starting with the 2016 ‘Consultation on the second Research Excellence Framework’, published by the Higher Education Funding Council for England.

"End-stage renal disease is a terminal illness with a glomerular filtration rate of less than 15 mL/min." - [Hashmi et al.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK499861/) My current state is an estimated GFR of 7 with dialysis 5 days per week to replace my destroyed kidney function. But the basic fact remains that this condition is terminal; it's just the question of how long it takes to finish me off.

People often think that reading a novel is a very linear activity. You start at the start and proceed through the text. As in most media forms, though, the beginning of any novel is really not truly its beginning. The American author, Thomas Pynchon, the focus of my paper today, is famed, it could be argued, mostly for three things.

The Research Excellence Framework is the UK system for rewarding unhypothecated research funding from the government to universities. It gives a block of funding that can be used in any way that the institution sees fit to advance research. It’s particularly useful in disciplines with less project funding to give research time to individual academics. The problem is, lots of academics hate REF.