That's a pretty specific title, I suspect, but as I am learning with the Open Library of Humanities, we're in uncharted territory, a place where the specifics matter.

This event will debate how and in what ways the web has complicated, enhanced, and changed the rights of citizens for better or for worse. The ongoing fallout from the Snowden revelations has both sharpened awareness of how our rights are changing and highlighted a culture of indifference towards once cherished rights and freedoms.

Some notes and early (very abstract) draft thoughts on whether Foucauldian genealogies, as redefined by Colin Koopman, can help us to address the problems of the archive in contemporary fiction studies. In Pynchon and Philosophy , I needed to give a succinct outline of the usual approach towards Foucault's broad body of history/philosophy.

At the end of 2013 and 2014 I wrote blog posts on Occam’s Corner (over at the Guardian) to list and briefly review the books I read in each of those years. I am trying to develop this practice into a good habit because it spurs me to read; and I hope it might also serve to flag up titles of interest to others.

Tomorrow I will be speaking at the HEFCE Metrics and the assessment of research quality and impact in the Arts and Humanities workshop, commissioned by the independent review panel. Here are some notes on what I am planning to say. These are just brief notes for a ten-minute talk. They're not particularly nuanced but I thought they were worth sharing.

In a recent essay, Richard M. Stallman, pioneer of the free software movement, asked “what does it mean for a computer to be loyal?” The "tentative definition" that Stallman outlines consists of: Neutrality towards software; Neutrality towards protocols; Neutrality towards implementations; Neutrality towards data communicated; Debugability; Documentation; and Completeness.

2014 was a good year for me. I spent my time mostly working on scholarly communications projects, including the meTypeset software for the Public Knowledge Project and then establishing the Open Library of Humanities with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Come along tomorrow to celebrate the launch of two books on "openness" in higher education! From 2pm UK time tomorrow, this room will be open for a discussion with Martin Weller and me. This event promises to be really interesting and to showcase a range of thought on open access. Martin's book, The Battle for Open was just published by Ubiquity Press while my own Open Access and the Humanities just came out with Cambridge University Press.

In my recent work I have begun to think of the subscription publication environment in terms of a risk pool. I wanted to use this space to share a little of this rationale because I think it gives us a valuable way of conceiving of projects like arXiv, Knowledge Unlatched, my Open Library of Humanities, and the K/N white paper.

I remain firmly convinced that many (but not all) of the economic problems of scholarly communication are linked to the fact that academic outputs are both vessels of communication and objects of measurement. This is most manifest in the way in which publications are used as measures of worth in hiring procedures, often through proxy measures that give financial power to commercial entities.

I am extremely pleased to announce that my book, Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future has today been published by Cambridge University Press. The book offers a background to open access and its specifics for the humanities disciplines, as well as setting out the economics and politics of the phenomenon. It also has a very fine preface by Peter Suber!