I've been pursuing a [Freedom of Information request](https://www.martineve.com/2015/11/18/bis-metrics-and-non-selective-qr-allocation/) against the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills for some time now. BIS have [consistently tried to block me](https://www.martineve.com/2015/12/28/internal-review-of-foi201525797/) from finding out what the Minister for HE, Jo Johnson (hereafter JJ), discussed with Elsevier.

Dear all, I am writing to complain about recent news reports in which Royal Free patient data, including my own, has been shared with Google. Firstly, to the extent permissible under English law, I wish to withdraw my consent for this information to be shared with Google or any other organization without my explicit consent.

Hypothes.is is an annotation framework that uses Pyramid to provide interface asset locations. This means that it is possible to override the interface and other components with one's own assets without simply forking the main hypothes.is repository. However, it's not actually completely clear how one does this.

I've heard reports that the journals _Science_ and _Nature_ want the metadata on forthcoming articles to be embargoed. In other words, they are saying that they do not want a repository version to become discoverable before the work is published, even if the article itself is not available through the repository. I think this is really unhelpful.

Having previously read and greatly enjoyed _The Aerodrome_, I sat down this morning and read Rex Warner's second novel, _The Professor_. I'd say it is a remarkable and interesting book that does something strange with notions of education, war, and fascism.

I noted, on Twitter, how pleased I was to discover that there was good information available online about my current condition. I want, here though, to offer a few words to the ridiculous arguments that are sometimes brought against open access. Namely, that there isn't a public for this material because it is specialized in both its wording and its content.

A few weeks ago, at the beginning of March, I was feeling quite unwell with a chest and sinus infection, for which I'd had three courses of antibiotics from my GP. It was pretty unpleasant but compared to what I was about to experience, it now looks trivial.

The recent Green Paper proposed that universities [should be excluded from the Freedom of Information Act](https://www.martineve.com/2015/11/10/he-green-paper-response-to-question-23/). As of today, it now looks very unlikely that this will happen.

Today, at the FORCE11 workshop that I am attending in Madrid our facilitators spoke of utopian thinking and then of attempting to realize that utopia in the realm of scholarly communications.

I'm at a workshop in Madrid organized by FORCE11. The first exercise was to imagine a world where universities did not exist, their hierarchies and power were abolished, but we still knew what we know. What would we build? I answered through a series of "undoing" questions: * What is HE for? * Why do we research? * What is "knowledge"? * What financial form would have to underpin whatever we build?

David Willetts is the politician responsible, above all others, in the United Kingdom for the £9,000 student fee level and its associated phenomena (including the privatization in all-but-name of UK universities). Yet he also writes extremely well of the essential unfairness and breaking of the intergenerational contract between the baby boomers and the millennials in which the latter bear a huge burden while the former group prosper.