I have, this afternoon (on a day off – I know, I know) been playing around with the LRB archive, looking for fun patterns in the chain of “who reviews whom”. Some preliminary thoughts… If, in careerist terms, essay writing is a network that is about social mobility, concerned with how authors affiliate themselves with one another, then we can possibly understand a little how the industry works – and how writers’ careers benefit – by

The Publisher’s Association has commissioned a report that seems to be their latest attempt at painting open access to research as economically damaging to the publishing sector.

Viewers of the Crown may have noticed a brief scene where Prince Charles practices Welsh by sitting in a glass cubicle wearing a headset.  Some viewers may recognize that as a language lab. Some may have even used language labs themselves. The core of the language lab technique is language drills, which are based on the bedrock of all skills training: mimicry, feedback and repetition.

Today I have written to the University of Leicester tendering my resignation as an external examiner. The text of resignation is below: Dear Professor Canagarajah, I write, following my previous correspondence of the 22nd January, to tender my resignation as an external examiner in the department of English at the University of Leicester. I wish to reiterate the concerns that I made in that email, to which I have had no response.

This morning I had to have a call with our accountants that I was somewhat dreading: does Brexit have tax implications for the Open Library of Humanities, a company limited by guarantee with charitable objects (a UK charity)? An important point about our model: OLH is not a supply.

This week opened with the distressing news that Lord Sumption, supposedly someone whose judgement is entirely sound, having been a Supreme Court justice, had told a cancer sufferer live on air that her life was less valuable than others. Pretty disgusting stuff that, to me, seems to show a type of thinking that is similar to eugenics;

I am due up for vaccination in the very near future. This is good news. But it’s tempered.

A discourse of ‘fairness’ has emerged in open-access circles in recent years. It has come from a sense that big, for-profit publishers have not played ‘fairly’ with libraries over the past 30 years. It is unsurprising. These large publishers make margins of 35%+ on billions of dollars of revenue, even while library budgets stagnate.

There was some research earlier this year that I thought was apt for the pandemic, showing that realism is key to being happy, not optimism or pessimism.

I have, today, submitted the manuscript of my book, currently titled Warez: The Economic Aesthetics and Alternative Reality Games of the Topsite Scene to the publisher!