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.

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.

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.