After a Herculean effort, coinciding with open access week 2020, our edited volume Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access has now been published by The MIT Press. It's available both in print to purchase and as a CC BY open-access download. I wanted to take this opportunity to write a few words about the goals of the volume, which speak to my interests in open access.

I am, at present, working on a book currently entitled Warez: The Economic Artforms and Illicit Crafts of the Topsite Scene , under contract with punctum books. The title has changed since it went under contract in order to better reflect the content – and it might well change again.

Today, in the Observer , the Sunday national newspaper of the liberal Guardian Media Group, Will Hutton offered a sobering retrospective of the university crisis during the Covid pandemic, from his position as the former principal of Hertford College, Oxford.

A journalist recently asked me for a comment on why I, as an academic who studies academic publishing, signed a petition calling for the retraction of Mead, Lawrence M., ‘Poverty and Culture’, Society, 2020 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-020-00496-1. I wanted to publish my full reasoning here ahead of any publication that might quote me. When I saw this petition circulating, I took time to read the article before signing the petition.

There’s an article out today in Research Fortnight detailing some of the frustrations that we had with a recent AHRC/UKRI grant proposal.

The pandemic is not over. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill just went back for a week of in-person term. Seven days later, they have shut down, with over 500 students in isolation. They can now offer only remote tuition. So I repeat to those who are being optimistic about this year: no, the pandemic is not over, it is far from over, and there are many many challenges ahead.

I recently participated in the American Historical Association’s open peer review experiment on the manuscript of ‘History Can Be Open Source’. I enjoyed reading the manuscript and welcomed the experiment. I would like to offer some experiential observations on the meta-process, in the open. I’ve used CommentPress before, so the technology was familiar.

Large language models make it entirely trivial to generate endless amounts of seemingly plausible text. There’s no need to be cynical to see the virtual inevitability of unending waves of algorithmically tuned AI-generated uninformation: the market forces are in place and they will be relentless.

A note to self (and others) for when this problem happens again. My university today updated the certificate for their OWA webmail service, signed by a certificate authority that I did not have in my trust chain.

I’m very excited about a new face mask I designed.  You can order it online! I was inspired by two tweets I saw within minutes of each other on July Fourth.  First, Médéric Gasquet-Cyrus, a professor at Aix-Marseille, posted a picture of  his colleague Pascal Roméas wearing a “triangle vocalique” T-shirt designed by the linguistics YouTuber Romain Filstroff, known as Linguisticae.