Last night I spent almost three hours reading [the full Ofqual statistical paper on subject comparability at school level in the UK](https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/486936/3-inter-subject-comparability-of-exam-standards-in-gcse-and-a-level.pdf). I am not a statistician (obviously) but I've set out below my working through of what they have presented and the underlying assumptions that they have made in

Last week, the [Tickell review of open access in the United Kingdom](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-access-to-research-independent-advice) was published. There are no unwelcome nasty surprises in the review and, in fact, there are a number of extremely progressive elements, most notably the formation of a monographs sub-committee to address this increasingly important area of practice.

I'm not one to mope or to seek any special sympathy but this month marks an ambivalent anniversary for me and I promised myself I'd write publicly about it. I want to do so because I know other people who have had a similar experience and someone else might find this blog and find it of interest. Ten years ago I was a very strong and fit young man, whose primary life-interest, to be blunt, was competition bouldering;

Today I don't feel well. In fact, I've got some horrible virus that's confining me mostly to bed, which I hate.

I had some utterly fantastic news yesterday that I think/hope it's now OK for me to share. At the start of the next academic year (from 1st October 2016) I will take up a personal chair as Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at my wonderful institution, Birkbeck, University of London. Ever since I had an idea to try for a career in academia a full professorship has been my dream;

The Budapest Open Access Initiative statement begins: "An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good". The old tradition is the practice of scientists and scholars to publish their work without remuneration. The new technologies are the internet and the world wide web. It remains true that it is a conjunction of these elements that can make open access work in academia.

I keep trying to write about the economics of open access to academic books via Book Processing Charges (BPCs) in a clear way. So there's nothing really new in this post but I think I did stumble today upon a way of putting things that I've said before in a different and more concise fashion.

An [article in the Times Higher Education yesterday](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/several-london-post-92s-see-falls-battle-students) got me thinking about institutional stability, finance, and the ongoing "reforms" to UK higher education.

Yesterday, I attended my university's official training course for Ph.D. examiners. It was an extremely useful day to familiarize myself with the regulations at the University of London and to hear about incoming procedures for independent viva chairs. However, one thing did leap out at me that I'd forgotten but that, in light of much thinking about scholarly communications, struck me as interesting. One of the criteria for the award of a Ph.D.

A central anxiety for literary studies in the era of scientific dominance pertains to the extent to which groupings, taxonomies and classifications are methodologically derived and how far they help us to understand literary production. We all invariably use and create such classifications as terminological shorthands.

Today, I gave a talk at Royal Holloway for the TECHNE consortium of Ph.D. students on open access and scholarly communications. In the second part of the session, as I often do, I opened up into a "blue-skies" game where I ask those present, in groups, to think through what they want from a system of scholarly communications and how they would design it from scratch today if they were freed of practical and social constraints.