I said last time that Jisc’s feeble transition-to-open-access report was the first of two disapointing scholarly-communication announcements that week. The second was of course the announcement that PeerJ has been acquired by Taylor and Francis. Matt and I have both been big fans of PeerJ since before it launched, and we were delighted to have our 2013 neck-anatomy paper in the first batch of articles published there.

Sorry for the short notice, but I just wanted to let you all know: Today is Academic-Led Publishing Day, which the official website describes as “a global digital event to foster discussions about how members of the scholarly community can develop and support academic-led publishing initiatives”. More informally, it’s about how we can throw off the shackles of “publishers” that have made themselves our masters rather than our servants.

The opening remarks by the hosts of conferences are usually highly forgettable, a courtesy platform offered to a high-ranking academic who has nothing to say about the conference’s subject. NOT THIS TIME! This is the opening address of APE 2018, the Academic Publishing in Europe conference.

This morning, I was invited to review a paper — one very relevant to my interests — for a non-open-access journal owned by one of the large commercial barrier-based publishers. This has happened to me several times now; and I declined, as I have done ever since 2011. I know this path is not for everyone.

The previous post (Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse) has been a surprise hit, and is now by far the most-read post in this blog’s nearly-ten-year history. It evidently struck a chord with a lot of people, and I’ve been surprised — amazed, really — at how nearly unanimously people have agreed with it, both in the comments here and on Twitter.

I’ve been on Twitter since April 2011 — nearly six years. A few weeks ago, for the first time, something I tweeted broke the thousand-retweets barrier. And I am really unhappy about it. For two reasons.

Back in February last year, I had the privilege of giving one of the talks in the University of Manchester’s PGCert course “Open Knowledge in Higher Education”. I took the subject “Should science always be open?” My plan was to give an extended version of a talk I’d given previously at ESOF 2014.

It’s open access week! As part of their involvement with OA Week, Jisc interviewed me. You can read the interview here. A brief taster: Read the full interview here.

As explained in careful detail over at Stupid Patent of the Month, Elsevier has applied for, and been granted, a patent for online peer-review. The special sauce that persuaded the US Patent Office that this is a new invention is cascading peer review — an idea so obvious and so well-established that even The Scholarly Kitchen was writing about it as a commonplace in 2010.

Back in mid-April, when I (Mike) was at the OSI2016 conference, I was involved in the “Moral Dimensions of Open” group. (It was in preparation for this that wrote the Moral Dimensions series of posts here on SV-POW!.) Like all the other groups, ours was tasked with making a presentation to the plenary session, taking questions and feedback, and presenting a version 2 on the final day. Here’s the title page that I contributed.