I'm currently handling a difficult case where a poetry publisher is demanding a royalty for citation of text within a work of literary criticism. They want to know how many "copies" we are "printing" so they can charge us. It is my view that this is totally extortionate and that this use is "fair dealing" under UK law for purposes of criticism and review.

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.

I have [a letter in today's Times Higher Education](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/letters-open-adaptation) repying to Marilyn Deegan on open-access books. The full, [unedited version of the letter is in my institutional repository](http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/19293) or below.

There has been a lot of angst about the newly proposed non-portability requirements for REF2021 and beyond, particularly from ECRs. I want to say upfront that I do not want to disparage such worries; I speak from a position of privilege, having a permanent position even though I am, by RCUK standards, myself an Early-Career Researcher. I do, though, want to set out why I think these fears are misplaced/over-blown.

Last week I attended the rather enjoyable English: Shared Futures conference and participated in a panel titled "[How to Get Published as an Early Career Academic](http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/19144)". This was a worthwhile thing to do, although it's a shame we need this.

Dear Walt, A response to [your letter](https://walt.lishost.org/2017/06/dear-martin/), albeit only briefly as it is late here on a Friday but I have only just seen this.

In mid-2015, Art Winslow caused something of an online furore when he suggested that the pseudonymously-authored novel by “Adrian Jones Pearson”, _Cow Country_, was, in fact, a work by Thomas Pynchon. A full-blown argument then erupted when this was countered by Nate Jones and Pynchon's own publisher.

You may remember that, a while back, the editorial board of Elsevier's journal, _Lingua_, decided to leave the publisher to setup a new journal called _Glossa_ that would be totally open access with no author-facing charges. The new journal is published by Ubiquity Press and has ongoing support from the Open Library of Humanities.

It seems to me that there are two types of "post-critical" articulations. Felski _et al_ are calling for a turn away from the idea that we should employ critique to analyse texts. That is, a call for a type of aesthetic formalism entwined with an appreciation of social entanglement. Latour also suggests turning away from critique in his "Why is Critique Running Out of Steam?" – but, that is, a critique of science.

The Lenovo G580 comes with Windows 8. It is possible to permanently lock yourself out of the operating system if you begin with a Microsoft account and migrate this to a local account. Further, you won't be able to rescue the system since _it is impossible to enter the BIOS setup in the machine's default state if you cannot login to Windows_.

Some thoughts to myself now voiced out loud. Meta-ethical moral relativism holds that there is no objective wrong or right between parties with different ethical views. Normative moral relativism holds that one should therefore tolerate each of these views. For many years, the political right railed against both of these forms of moral relativism.