It has been drawn to my attention that the 2014 report from the British Academy seems to have disappeared from their site. I hereby re-host it: Darley, Rebecca, Daniel Reynolds, and Chris Wickham. Open access journals in humanities and social science. London: British Academy, 2014. The report is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 provision.
An off-cut from writing. In his seminal work, _We Have Never Been Modern_, Bruno Latour highlights (and criticises) two opposed strains of social-scientific thought. The first school to come under fire from Latour is the social constructivists. This mode of thought is one wherein most aspects of objective reality can be shown as determined by social convention. The classic example of this is gender.
David Cameron, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has "[named and shamed](http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/09/17/david-cameron-urges-universities-to-combat-campus-extremism_n_8151286.html?1442503290)" several top universities for allowing claimed "hate speech" on campus.
I feel fairly drained today reading [the speech given by the minister for Higher Education](https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/higher-education-fulfilling-our-potential), Jo Johnson.
In [a previous piece](/2015/08/22/researchers-are-altering-their-methods-because-of-uncertainty-over-creative-commons-licenses/), I noted in defence of Creative Commons licenses that "Whether a work is openly licensed or not does not affect whether people can or will write things that are not true". In that piece, I focused on the fact that legal redress seems to remain available under a CC BY license.
In recent days my server has become prey to ever-more brute-force attacks against Wordpress instances. This is a total pain, although they're unlikely (touch wood) to succeed given the complexity of the passwords I tend to deploy and non-standard account names. That said, I got tired of this and wanted to figure out how to block them. The biggest problem I encountered is that some of these password-guessing attacks were coming from a botnet.
First of all, let me say that I found the piece of work I'm about to discuss really interesting in its own right. I know one of the co-authors and I'm an avid Soundcloud user (for electronic music, no-less!) so I thought this would be right up my street.
Sigh. More hacking attempts and seems someone did manage to inject a php eval attack into one of my Wordpress installs.
In a recent [piece for The Bookseller](http://www.thebookseller.com/blogs/anthony-cond-309360), Anthony Cond (for whom I have a huge deal of respect), writes approvingly, if cautiously, of the births of new university presses. Indeed, there is much to celebrate in the idea of the university taking back the means of its research production on a not-for-profit basis. I am wholly in support of such a mission.
Everyone, when they are writing, can find themselves falling into bad habits. This is because, as my friend Liz Sage pointed out to me, when you are writing, you're trying to express thought. It's a writerly activity for you, the author, not thinking wholly of the reader. Examples of things that I do include repeating the same word in a sentence and using split infinitives.
Over the past week I've done some of the initial development work on [CaSSius](https://github.com/MartinPaulEve/CaSSius), the portion of the typesetter for the [Open Library of Humanities](https://www.openlibhums.org) that produces PDF output. The idea here is that, as a publisher, you want to produce one document and then create HTML and PDF from that single source. CaSSius provides two ways to achieve this.
