#About This is an author's accepted manuscript for a review published in [_Journal of American Studies_](http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0021875815001607). It will appear in a revised form, subsequent to editorial input by Cambridge University Press. This article is copyright 2015 Cambridge University Press.

Dear Mr. Johnson, I read this morning [the report on the Conservative Home](http://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2015/10/the-accountability-and-transparency-revolution-coming-soon-to-a-university-near-you-courtesy-of-jo-johnson.html) website about future plans for British higher education.

I've been sitting on the below piece for a while, but have [written about academia.edu before](https://www.martineve.com/2014/09/05/things-academia-edu-academia-should-do-hint-work-with-green-oa/). In recent days, though, [Gary Hall](http://www.garyhall.info/journal/2015/10/18/does-academiaedu-mean-open-access-is-becoming-irrelevant.html) and [Kathleen Fitzpatrick](http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/academia-not-edu/) have both written critiques

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.