As I’ve written before, Learned Societies are one of the biggest barriers to open access. They derive revenue from publishing that they then use to pay for disciplinary goods (scholarships, prizes, public engagement etc.) Fear of new economic models for scholarly communications sometimes, although not always, drives them away from open access. I have never thought this was a good way to pay for these aspects of our academic practice.

Imagine that you belong to a category, like “tourist.” You fit all the necessary conditions for membership in that category: you are traveling to another part of the world for recreation. But that category has a bad reputation – literally a bad name. What do you do? You split the category.

Peter Suber has asked, following a long chain of thinking about knowledge as a non-rivalrous form that is inscribed, historically, within rivalrous forms: Digital texts are often considered non-rivalrous.

Diversity is notoriously subjective and difficult to pin down. In particular, we tend be impressed if we know the names of a lot of categories for something. We might think there are more mammal species than insect species, but biologists tell us that there are hundreds of thousands of species of beetles alone.

2016 was a year of mixed fortune for me. On the positive side, OLH continues to grow, I was made a (full) Professor, and I published two books. On the downside, I was seriously ill, suffering a stroke linked to vasculitis in March, from which I have made a near-full recovery. I’ve enjoyed working with my PhD students, though, and am looking forward to a less eventful 2017!

Annotation tools on the web are somewhat fragile. They depend upon complex XPath queries and other anchoring technologies to ensure that annotations are keyed to known positions. The problem is that often, even where content is stable in one sense (e.g. in an academic journal article), redesigns of the page itself can lead to serious problems for annotation keying. This creates orphan annotations.

In 1936, Literary Digest magazine made completely wrong predictions about the Presidential election. They did this because they polled based on a bad sample: driver’s licenses and subscriptions to their own magazine. Enough people who didn’t drive or subscribe to Literary Digest voted, and they voted for Roosevelt. The magazine’s editors’ faces were red, and they had the humility to put that on the cover.

The internal draft of the Consultation on the Second Research Excellence Framework that was requested by FOI last February contained the following clause: The proposal for 5*s of grading has been quietly dropped from the final consultation. This seems odd. Panels last time seemed to want further levels of detail (to make the exercise more sensitive/discriminatory in its judgements). This wasn’t in Stern.

HEFCE has today released its Consultation on the Second Research Excellence Framework after a year of delays in light of the Stern Review and now modified from the previous internal draft. In true “hot-take” style up-to-the-minute policy reading, I’ve done a quick first read through of the document and wanted to note some aspects. Note that these are mostly all open to revision in light of feedback to the consultation.

In his recent piece for WonkHE, Chris Husbands, the chair of the TEF panel, wrote in order to “bust” five myths about the TEF. Identifying these as “punishing widening participation”, a “metrics-only” approach, the weakness of the “provider statement”, “pre-ordained outputs”, and an exclusion of the “student view”, Husbands goes some distance to allaying a few fears.