On the same day as I submitted my next book manuscript, I am pleased to be able to say that Reading Peer Review, my 7 ^th academic book, has been published by Cambridge University Press. The book is open access and available at CUP or in BIROn. Here’s the blurb: How do you change the world of academia and what insight can peer review provide into this question?

I usually start my New Year’s resolutions on the 28 ^th or 29 ^th December. I do this because I don’t like the season of excess; I come out of it feeling unfit, bloated, unstructured etc. Last year’s resolutions went somewhat down the pan as the pandemic blew everything away. This year, I have some personal goals: I put on 7kg during the pandemic. I want to lose this. I will achieve this by upping my exercise.

My Ph.D. supervisors were not particularly hands on. This was not slacking on their part – it suited me just fine and they could see that I had the thesis project in hand. There was a lesson from one of my supervisors that I will never forget, though. I was writing my first conference paper proposal/abstract. I felt it wasn’t quite right and asked for his advice.

The disciplines that have had it hardest for unwanted appropriation and assumed specialization this year have undoubtedly been various strands of medicine, virology, immunology, and epidemiology. Just going to put it out there, up front, that the notes here are nothing compared to the attempted popular seizure of expertise to which these disciplines have been subjected.

I wrote, last year, that 2019 was pretty bad for me. Little did any of us know of the grimness that 2020 would bring with the coronavirus pandemic. I have spent almost all of this year “shielding”, which can feel somewhat isolating, although I am fortunate to live with my wife, which ameliorates this greatly.

There’s a prominent post at Ars Technica called Linux on laptops: Ubuntu 19.10 on the HP Dragonfly Elite G1 that implies that it is easy and straightforward to install Ubuntu on the HP Dragonfly Elite laptop. The post is correct that releases later than 19.10 have full kernel support for nearly all of the laptop’s hardware, but there are some very important caveats to the install.

Studies such as my Warez book fall under the rubric of ‘netnographies’; work that attempt to examine ethnographically the principles and characteristics of various online cultures. A fundamental challenge of working in this space is the issue of ethics, though. Most of the documents and conversations that have been surfaced in the DeFacto2 archive were thought, by the conversation participants, to have been held in private.

I have other things to do but one day I’ll enlarge on the insidious effects of elevating this cursed little histogram of “Research output per year” as the single most important bit of information about academics at thousands of universities that use Elsevier Pure. Consider this mini-rant my notes for that occasion. Most importantly, we DO NOT write per year. Our careers are too diverse and precarious to measure output that way.

With Times Higher Education writing about citation gaming and hyperprolific authors (surely not unrelated) I hope we can save some of our attention for what Uta Frith and others have called slow science.

As part of my efforts on Work Package 3 of the COPIM project I am engaged in a project that seeks to convert publishers to business models that will allow them to publish their books openly, without using unaffordable book processing charges (which authors hate and which will not scale). I am pleased to say that, as of today, we can announce the first press to take the leap: the Central European University Press.