In the past few days, well [over a year since HEFCE signalled](http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/HEFCE,2014/Content/Pubs/2016/201636/HEFCE2016_36.pdf) its "inten[tion] to move towards an open-access requirement for monographs in the exercise that follows the next REF (expected in the mid-2020s)", humanities academics have been getting themselves stirred up on the basis of a document issued by the [Royal Historical

I've just been reading the [EC’s tender document](https://etendering.ted.europa.eu/cft/cft-document.html?docId=37014) for their new open-access platform. Everyone thinks that it's a shoo-in for F1000.

A lot of the social media posts that I've seen recently about the UCU's call for "Action Short of a Strike" (ASOS) are fixated on the idea that everyone's contract stipulates that they will work from 9 in the morning until 5 (or 6) in the afternoon and that one should not work outside these hours. One should not send email, either, apparently outside these hours.

I have a Keith McMillen K-Mix audio device that I use for music-making. I noticed, though, that if you have a simple stereo setup on this, with, say, monitors plugged into outputs 1 and 2 (the master outs) then you basically lose a huge amount of bass response on Linux. I confirmed this trying it on Windows and Linux and, in Linux, the bass is totally missing. In fact, the sound is weak.

Thinking aloud. The [San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)](https://sfdora.org/) is undoubtedly a good idea, in my view. The thrust of the declaration states that research should only be assessed at the unit level, rather than at the level of the journal/venue.

Who do you think was responsible for the monumental failure of judgement that ended with Toby Young being appointed to a regulatory body for HE in the UK, the so-called but misnamed "Office for Students"? You'd think that it would be impossible that anybody actually ran a recruitment panel that would come to such a conclusion, but the Department for Education got back to me today on my Freedom of Information request to provide answers to my

Let's assume that we have a Learned Society that fulfills the following conditions: 1. The society wants to move to an OA model for the good of disciplinary dissemination. 2. The society has an existing subscription base. 3. The society can take a hit of 3% on its subscription revenue. 4. The society can handle a 90% renewal rate alongside the 3% hit.

I am frequently asked, by libraries, to provide usage statistics for their institutions at the Open Library of Humanities. I usually resist this, since there are a number of ways in which the metrics are not usually a fair comparison to subscription resources. A few notes on this. 1. We do not have or require any login information. This means that the only way that we can provide usage information is by using the institutional IP address.

2017 was, as with last year, a mixed bag for me. On the positive side, OLH continues to grow, I received a grant for the peer-review project on which I am working, we released _Janeway_ the scholarly communcations platform, and I had a number of publications out. _Password_ was published in Korean and I am about to sign a book contract for my next monograph.

This is partly a therapeutic post to get this off my chest and partly a post to which I can point friends and colleagues to avoid re-explaining everything every time. Since mid-September 2017, when I had pneumonia, sepsis, and a spinal-column infection, I have been losing my hearing. It varies hugely as to how bad this is from day to day.

The [recent self-censorship](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/08/21/cambridge-university-press-blocks-access-300-plus-articles-request-chinese-censors) by Cambridge University Press in China is billed, by some, as an assault on academic freedom. It is certainly a worrying trend.