These are my notes on The UKRI Open Access Review Consultation Document. The document informs but is not a policy for the REF-after-REF 2021. This document does not change the REF 2021 policy. For peer-reviewed research articles and conference proceedings with an ISSN the new policy proposed here would apply on and after 1 January 2022.

I am often asked for advice on writing data management plans in the humanities, so thought I would share my advice on this more generally. The first thing you need to do is to work out what “data” you are likely to collect or generate. Note that any manuscript you are writing should be considered as a digital data object. Sensitivity. How sensitive are the data? Do they identify living or dead people? What information do they reveal about them?

This is really speculative, but today I returned to David McClure’s excellent and fun TextPlot tool. A type of topic modelling (but not LDA), McClure explains his Bray-Curtis dissimilarity mapping in a separate post but essentially what is being measured here is the interconnectedness and proximity of various terms within a network graph.

Recently some guy tweeted “Seeing the Star Wars movies does not make you a Star Wars fan. Actual Star Wars fans have done some of the following…”  This is a great opportunity for me to talk about a particular kind of category fight: coercion. Over the past several years I’ve written about some things people try to do with categories: watchdogging, gatekeeping, pedantry, eclipsing and splitting.

I am tempted to think that Taylor & Francis’s acquisition of F1000 should be critiqued on grounds of yet more gross for-profit consolidation in the scholarly publishing ecosystem. I believe this is true. But funders won’t care. The EU wants to maintain its stance of market non-interference and I do not believe that the for-profit status of such entities bothers others like Wellcome or Gates.

Urgh. I had a RAID 6 reshape on my NAS that was projected to take 28 days to complete, I kid you not. It was stuck at an abysmal 4MB/s transfer rate. Here’s how to unblock it. First, follow all the advice on general raid speedups – assuming md2 is your RAID device and you need to replace sd[DEVICE] below with the correct block devices that constitute the array: This is all common advice that it is easy to find.

This was, in many ways, a pretty bad year for me. My health has, to be frank, been appalling once more. It has necessitated treatment with cyclophosphamide in hospital, a chemotherapy agent that makes you feel very unwell and leaves your immune system vulnerable to every vulturous bug under the sun.

I am quoted in today’s Research Fortnight on the new REF staff/individual circumstances under the heading ‘REF staff circumstances rules criticised’. The quote used only gives a selection of the views that I supplied and omits the bits where I say why the new situation might be better (that’s fine – it’s journalism and I was not quoted inaccurately). Here are my full remarks in context: What are you personal experiences of REF staff

It is often assumed that researchers submit their work to the highest prestige titles and, when rejected, move down the ‘hierarchy’ to titles with less stringent review criteria (see, for instance, Poynder, Richard, ‘PLoS ONE, Open Access, and the Future of Scholarly Publishing’, 2011, https://richardpoynder.co.uk/PLoS_ONE.pdf, p. 29). The irony is that at each stage of this process the paper may be revised and rewritten in the light of

Some time around 2016 I was invited by Kasia Boddy and David Winters to contribute to a special issue of Critical Quarterly that they were putting together. The issue was centred on notions of authorship in the digital age. This came at an opportune time as I had been playing with training a recurrent neural network on the back corpus of the literary studies journal, Textual Practice , and had some promising results.