Yesterday, I examined a Ph.D. It's not an unusual experience -- and huge congratulations to the candidate who had a well-deserved pass! But every time I go through this process I spot a number of weaknesses in the UK examination system that really should be put right. These reflections are not specific to the thesis I just examined. They are, rather, a broader policy reflection on the process.

Most major studies of the discipline of English that I know of, such as Gerald Graff's _Professing Literature: An Institutional History_ (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989) and Franklin E. Court's _Institutionalizing English Literature: Culture and Politics of Literary Study, 1750–1900_ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), situate its birth as “English language and literature” in 1828 at the University of London (referring

Throughout the works of Michel Pastoureau (at least in his books on Black and Green) are sketched ideas of the notion of a "chromoclasm". The proposition that Pastoureau seeks to advance is that the austere aesthetic favored by Zwingli, Calvin, Melanchthon, and Luther – linked to the avoidance of graven images and varying levels of iconoclasm – reoriented the color spectrum around a ‘black-gray-white axis’ ([p.

I've spent the past few weeks tracking down answers to the questions: "When and why did paper become white and why was white paper so valued?" for my work on [_Paper Thin_](https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/31744/). Here are some of my very abridged findings. This sounds as though it's a trivial question. Obviously, we think, it must have something to do with contrast and ensuring the best legibility. This is definitely not the case.

It’s an exciting time in the OA book world because many experiments are coming to fruition. We’ve seen MIT’s recent D2O offering; Michigan has a new membership programme; punctum books and Open Book Publishers are on the go; Springer is piloting a scheme with Berkeley;

This morning I have been looking at the UK government's so-called "[Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill](https://bills.parliament.uk/Publications/41479/Documents/212/21012.pdf)". The politics of this are extremely complicated, but suffice it to say that when the Minister for HE ends up having to say that [the legislation will help get Holocaust deniers onto

This week, [cOAlition S endorsed the Subscribe to Open (S2O) business model](https://www.coalition-s.org/coalition-s-endorses-the-s2o-model-of-funding-oa/). This group of international funders is committed to a complete transition to open-access publishing.

I posted, a short while ago, about the [reprinting of OA books under CC licenses](https://eve.gd/2021/03/02/oa-books-being-reprinted-under-cc-by-license/). This is, of course, totally legal and allowed under the more liberal Creative Commons licenses. However, it will, I feel, alienate academics from OA. I think that they will consider it derogatory treatment of their work.

I love my Moog Minitaur synth. It's a great little bass station that packs a punch. However, I have been facing some issues using its full functionality. Namely, there's a software plugin that enables you to tweak all the settings from the DAW. It controls the synth over midi via USB.

Do you think that the Subscribe-To-Open model could be applied to new academic presses who have no backlist? Yes. The Open Library of Humanities, which I run, does not have a backlist but works on this model. It’s a great deal of work to set up and articulating the value proposition is more challenging, but it’s still doable. Thank you for your presentation. You mention usage from 129 different countries during spring 2020.

I was thinking idly today -- and probably in a wildly unoriginal way -- about some of the disputes about subscriptions to software and the politics of this model.