Here are my draft responses to the parts of the [Consultation on the Second Research Excellence Framework](http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/year/2016/201636/) that attracted my interested. These are my individual thoughts, not those of any institution that I represent. They are also not my final submission. __1.

From January this year, I am a member of the Universities UK Open Access Monographs Working Group. The aims of the group, in preparation for the mandate for the anticipated Third Research Excellence Framework in the mid-2020s, are to monitor progress towards the practical implementation of open access monographs; to promote and accelerate cultural change towards OA publishing within academia and among traditional publishers;

[As I've written before](https://www.martineve.com/2014/10/04/pondering-a-solution-to-the-problem-of-learned-societies-and-the-transition-to-open-access/), Learned Societies are one of the biggest barriers to open access.

[Peter Suber has asked](http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/11-02-09.htm), following a long chain of thinking about knowledge as a non-rivalrous form that is inscribed, historically, within rivalrous forms: >What is a public good? In the technical sense used by economists, a public good is non-rivalrous and non-excludable. A good is non-rivalrous when it's undiminished by consumption.

2016 was a year of mixed fortune for me. On the positive side, OLH continues to grow, I was made a (full) Professor, and I published two books. On the downside, I was seriously ill, suffering a stroke linked to vasculitis in March, from which I have made a near-full recovery. I've enjoyed working with my PhD students, though, and am looking forward to a less eventful 2017!

Annotation tools on the web are somewhat fragile. They depend upon complex XPath queries and other anchoring technologies to ensure that annotations are keyed to known positions. The problem is that often, even where content is _stable_ in one sense (e.g. in an academic journal article), redesigns of the page itself can lead to serious problems for annotation keying. This creates orphan annotations.

The internal draft of the [Consultation on the Second Research Excellence Framework that was requested by FOI last February](https://www.martineve.com/2016/02/18/REF-consultation/) [contained the following clause](https://www.martineve.com/2016/02/18/REF-consultation/): > The outcomes of REF 2014 demonstrated the world-leading and continuously improving performance of UK research.

HEFCE has today released its [Consultation on the Second Research Excellence Framework](http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/year/2016/201636/) after a year of delays in light of the Stern Review and now modified from the [previous internal draft](https://www.martineve.com/2016/02/18/REF-consultation/). In true "hot-take" style up-to-the-minute policy reading, I've done a quick first read through of the document and wanted to note some aspects.

In his [recent piece for WonkHE](http://wonkhe.com/blogs/busting-five-common-myths-about-the-tef/), Chris Husbands, the chair of the TEF panel, wrote in order to “bust” five myths about the TEF. Identifying these as “punishing widening participation”, a “metrics-only” approach, the weakness of the “provider statement”, “pre-ordained outputs”, and an exclusion of the “student view”, Husbands goes some distance to allaying a few fears.

Today, along with Stuart Lawson and Jon Tennant, I have submitted the below as a complaint to the Competition and Markets Authority, making good on the advice of Ann McKechin, MP at the BIS Inquiry into Open Access in 2013.

The most frequent question that is asked in scholarly communication circles about gold open access is whether a business model is sustainable and/or scalable. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that we are talking about publishing the exact same quantity of material as we are under a subscription model, here's what that means: 1. Does the model distribute costs in a way that makes it affordable to the actors who pay?