The Royal Historical Society has published [an interim/draft report feeding back on Plan S](https://5hm1h4aktue2uejbs1hsqt31-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/RHSPlanSInterimJan19.pdf). Although not a historian but as someone with a keen interest in open access in the humanities disciplines -- and in the spirit of open exchange, since this document has understandably caused some alarm among humanities scholars -- I wanted to

2018 was, in general, a pretty good year for me. Certainly, parts of it were marred by handling my new hearing loss, but an assistive device (a speech-filtering microphone system) has greatly helped with this, although I am still functionally deaf in many environments. On the plus side, though, I moved house to the Kent coast and it has been one of the best things we've done in years.

The announcement of Plan S -- an ambitious undertaking to mandate open access in Europe by 2020 on most funded research, but also now expanding overseas, potentially to the States and beyond -- has prompted debates about the place of academic freedom in the selection of publication venue and whether OA mandates might infringe on such rights.

If you read any review of the M-Audio Trigger Finger Pro, it sounds like a steal. A sequencer, drum machine, and more, all packed into a hardware unit that is available for about £100 on Ebay. Steal. The problem is, it seems that these reviewers have never actually tried to record midi output from the device.

A coalition of funders from across Europe has proposed a bold initiative, called [Plan S](http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/23819/), to [push towards OA for 2020](https://www.scienceeurope.org/coalition-s/). It includes the following 10 points: * Authors retain copyright of their publication with no restrictions.

As you may know, the Centre for Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck publishes and maintains a piece of open-source software for journal publishing called [Janeway](https://github.com/BirkbeckCTP/janeway/). This software is licensed under the AGPLv3. We chose this license for several reasons, but the most important was that we wanted strong CopyLeft protection, including for server-side usage, on this software.

I spent some time this morning trying to work out why my CPU - the beastly Intel i9 7980XE - was capped at 2.6ghz when the BIOS allows scaling to 4.3ghz. When I ran the usually suggested cpufreq and cpupower commands, I received: "no or unknown cpufreq driver is active on this CPU". The reason for this was that you need, in the UEFI/BIOS, to enable: Intel Enhanced SpeedStep and the option to expose pstates.

Even as worldwide militaries develop autonomous killer robots, when we think of the ethics of AI, we often turn to the Asimov principles: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

HEFCE, the precursor to Research England, [announced in 2016](http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/HEFCE,2014/Content/Pubs/2016/201636/HEFCE2016_36.pdf) that “we intend to move towards an open-access requirement for monographs in the exercise that follows the next REF (expected in the mid-2020s).” This was published in 2016 as, “[g]iven the length of time required to produce and publish monographs,” HEFCE wished “to give due notice to the sector” by

Some open-access advocates argue that transparency and accountability are key for open access (meaning: the removal of price and permission barriers to reading academic research). Indeed, this is one of the many points when the discourses of neoliberal* governmentality intersect with open academic publication.

I'm very pleased to be able to announce some forthcoming titles in the Bloomsbury _New Horizons in Contemporary Writing_ series that I edit! Dates are, of course, subject to change but we have a really exciting line up of titles coming soon!