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.

Research Fortnight is running an interesting piece about [the REF consultation document that was pulled late last year](https://www.researchprofessional.com/0/rr/news/uk/ref-2014/2016/2/-Anyone-for-5--research---HEFCE-asked-in-postponed-consultation-.html). Indeed, while the sector is desperate for information about the requirements for the next REF (we're currently playing somewhat blind), the consultation has been postponed while the Stern

At the time of a global health emergency -- the Zika virus -- there are renewed calls for a faster and more open research publication system in disciplines where lives may be saved. This is important, valuable work. We should not be letting people suffer through the slowness of output. The remarks in this post do not apply to those spaces of biomedical advance, on which I am not qualified to comment.

Last night I spent almost three hours reading [the full Ofqual statistical paper on subject comparability at school level in the UK](https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/486936/3-inter-subject-comparability-of-exam-standards-in-gcse-and-a-level.pdf). I am not a statistician (obviously) but I've set out below my working through of what they have presented and the underlying assumptions that they have made in

Last week, the [Tickell review of open access in the United Kingdom](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-access-to-research-independent-advice) was published. There are no unwelcome nasty surprises in the review and, in fact, there are a number of extremely progressive elements, most notably the formation of a monographs sub-committee to address this increasingly important area of practice.

Today I don't feel well. In fact, I've got some horrible virus that's confining me mostly to bed, which I hate.

I'm not one to mope or to seek any special sympathy but this month marks an ambivalent anniversary for me and I promised myself I'd write publicly about it. I want to do so because I know other people who have had a similar experience and someone else might find this blog and find it of interest. Ten years ago I was a very strong and fit young man, whose primary life-interest, to be blunt, was competition bouldering;