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August 2019

Hmm. Although the cyclophosphamide does appear to make me feel better for much of the month, I continue to grow ever more anaemic. IV iron infusion scheduled for next Friday.

Javid describes relationship with PM as "fantastic", as in "it's fantastic that he didn't order the goons to break my arms"?

I really don't know how to react to the fact that pointing out the contradictions and hypocrisy of our politicians has now precisely zero political impact. Truth has to mean something. But truth feels now ineffectual, just an idealistic nod while the world burns.

Almost tweeted snarkily re an invitation to speak has a PDF letter attached instead of just having the text in the email. but realised that I also did this in a formal response yesterday. Now have possible article title going around my head: "The medial prestige of pagination".

Apparently, 10% of the public surveyed in the UK think that people working for charities should have to work one day per month without pay. I assume they didn't think that those working for for-profits should also have to work one day per month for charity for free? 🤔🤔🤔

Top vintage synth play this evening. Actually, this thing is a total pain to use. Particularly if you don't have a cassette to export to.

The World Health Organization joins cOAlition S and Plan S, insisting that work it funds is openly accessible, immediately, and not in hybrid journals. The WHO. Helping you not to die since 1948.

I recognise that there have been and continue to be criticisms of WHO. But this is a positive step for health research.

From what I understand, clause 3.4 of the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation etc) Act 2019 forbids prorogation of parliament during October 2019 and the earliest it could be meaningfully called as a result is 1st Nov 2019. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2019/22/enacted

I gather a legal appeal has already been mounted on these grounds https://x.com/JolyonMaugham/status/1166658605182902272

But there are also some complications https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/2019/08/01/asif-hameed-proroguing-parliament/

Yesterday, for the book on peer review, I was writing about the fact that blind peer review often is not and thereby instils a false confidence. Today, with 100% confidence, I have identified the peer reviewer who wrote this report.

Morning everyone! Emerging from the chemo grimness to positive book reader reports on my edited collection. Can't resist sharing: "as such, I expect this book to become a landmark intervention in the field". Hurrah! It's been a mega-long haul.

yeah, authors, I'll be in touch. There are some changes :P

book at The MIT Press. Will be open access.

We're approaching the 200 peer-reviewed articles mark in the @openlibhums journal. Here's what people are saying about it. "Based on my experience, I would highly recommend OLH as a publishing venue, and won't hesitate to work with them again" - Adam Kelly https://openlibhums.org/site/testimonials/

@openlibhums "Working with OLH as an editor and author for the Station Eleven special collection has been a great experience" - @tedilta https://openlibhums.org/site/testimonials/

@openlibhums @tedilta "When I sought a venue for the special issue on videogames and postcolonialism, I was thinking of the millions of people in the ... global south countries who had no access to the articles in paywalled journals ... OLH, therefore, was a godsend" - Dr Souvik Mukherjee

@openlibhums @tedilta "Working with the Open Library of Humanities proved to be an immensely rewarding and smooth editorial experience." - Dr Emil Hammar https://openlibhums.org/site/testimonials/

Music conversations in our house between upstairs and downstairs

... And then I read this

From @philipcball's excellent /The Music Instinct/

This overlooks the political devil's pact of REF and the particularities of UK research funding in my view. Government funding is argued for because it is said that it is awarded through a rigorous independent system of peer review (REF). https://x.com/petersuber/status/1165284843825127425

I'm actuality, disciplines are awarded back the authority to assess themselves. Finding a way to do it more cheaply and identically through metrics doesn't really help solve the implicit political agreement reached through what we have, despite its many flaws.

The amazing thing about Star Trek: First Contact is the sheer ambition of that bloke from Babe: The Sheep Pig. Most of us would have been happy to have won a sheepdog show with a pig, but he had to go on to make the first warp flight in history. Remarkable.

Dose 3 has so far been both a better and worse ride. Yesterday I felt so appalling, today was tolerable, though. This is promising.

Right, Twitter, I'm back off down the chemotherapy hole. See you on Wednesday, though I'll be lurking for entertainment in between the bouts of horrible sickness...

Thinking around the legalities of negligence and post-publication peer review in medical spheres for authors and publishers. In pre-publication modes, having the checks could count as due diligence. Unsure if that's true in post-publication modalities.

related: academic publishers regularly both require authors to disclaim them from negligence for inaccuracies while also boasting of the soundness of the scientific record of which they are custodians

"The project requires that we support 5 publishers total"

Last commit by @Mauro__MSL__: "This increases the number of supported publishers by 57"

Theory: there is no type of spam email that is more annoying than the "I'm just writing to check whether you received my first email" variant.

Perhaps the reason that people think that the OLH/consortial model for OA is prone to free riders is that you would free-ride if we were a for-profit, extortionary enterprise rather than a not-for-profit charity. But we aren't.

That is, good actors in the scholcomms sector could adopt a consortial model and, I hypothesize, would not see substantial free riding. Other types of enterprise would struggle because it's only by coercive ownership of troves of the research literature that they get renewals.

The _type_ of entity conditions whether a non-classical economic model will work as much as the offering itself.

Excitement mounting in the Janeway engineering channel as we approach the release of 1.3.6! @ajrbyers @Mauro__MSL__

Top tip: get that Tuesday despot dictator feeling by ticking the "suppress author" button in Zotero's citation feature.

Was having a miserable time; was looking forward to A Love From Outer Space this Friday at Phonox, which has a fantastic sound system. Decided I should cancel for infection control on chemo drugs. Then @liannedemello messaged and is coming to stay. All is not so bad after all! :)

Totally anecdotal but it seems to me that the academic job market in English Lit. is absolutely dire compared to this time in the last REF cycle, when I got my first job.

I suspect, given the parlous state of UK HE finance in the face of Brexit, that this is not unexpected. Planned changes to REF rules could also mean that there is a hiring burst _after_ REF for those with impact potential.

It looks like a drought. The positions I have seen advertised are also much shorter-term.

I applied for 46 jobs in 2012 before I had my Ph.D. in hand (I considered it practice/a way of improving the application - I got the first one I applied for after the doctorate was awarded). I haven't seen anywhere near that number this year.

Admittedly, I'm less scrutinous now because I'm not looking for a job, but it feels very tough out there, to say the least.

I realised yesterday that I had never actually read Ishiguro's _The Remains of the Day_, but only seen the brilliant film adaptation. Settled down with it and yes, wow, what a book.

Went to a couple of gigs at the Broadstairs Folk Week kick-off today. Both very good. But it is strange to me how folk singers have to explain what their songs are "about". Most of their lyrics have poetic qualities, yet few poets begin by saying: "this poem is about X".

there's an annoying habit therein, also, of explaining any jokey lyrical reference. "This is a humorous song about country music. In the film The Blues Brothers they say 'we got both kinds of music, country AND western', and we reference this. See if you can spot it."

low faith in audience to pick up on allusions? Anxiety around quality of storytelling in lyrics? Just an ingrained behavioural habit? Sometimes it's quite nice to hear where or when a song was written, but I don't want to know what it's "about" for the writers, really.

also realised I don't like poetry readings much

Today's reading, at long last!, is @tressiemcphd's Lower Ed. Buckling in for a depressing ride.

@tressiemcphd Astute and as brilliant as people said. Read it cover to cover and couldn't put it down.

Today's reading is Siri Hustvedt's /The Summer Without Men/. Not technically possible for me on the gender front, but I am avoiding most company of hu-mankind for infection reasons...

Something I can't decide: should OLH charge APCs when we get work from researchers under funders who will pay such per-article charges and when the funder doesn't support OLH on a membership? On the one hand, we could use the revenue. On the other, I don't want to encourage APCs.

Not sure it was "emotionally charged". I mean, I wasn't bawling my eyes out at the keyboard. It was more "somewhat pissed off and laden with sarcasm".

This morning's clickbait in my feed: "if you want to get good at pull-ups, this is the one exercise you need".

Me: "is it a pull-up?"

The model is quite good at recognising overall verdicts, which occur in most reviews (I do not recommend publication . [revision] [outcome]), but not so good at recognising rarer statements, such as reviewer admissions of fallibility.

Figure 5 is very unclear . [ambiguity]

Good at recognising ambiguity, poor at recognising that this is a statement about presentation.

There is nothing technically wrong with the paper , but it is not that original . [overarching comment]

Yes, but it's also a statement on originality.

OK, the model is overfitting somewhat, but the neural network text classifier that I have developed for our peer-review study is producing results:

"I do not understand how the supplementary data fit in here." [analysis] [cohesion] [ambiguity] [argument]

The @RoyalMail experience: 1. don't tell me I need to pay a custom charge, but I find out and pay it + request redelivery. 2. Can't redeliver b/c new addr in diff area. But they don't tell me. I re-request to orig address. 3. They don't deliver & are now returning item to sender.

@RoyalMail now on hold. "Have you tried using our website?", the hold voice intones on loop. Yes, I have. It's shit and clearly doesn't work.

@RoyalMail and they just cut me off on the phone. This is utterly unacceptably crap. @RoyalMailHelp

I went off twitter for the length of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. When I returned there was something going on about hogs.

Lol. There appears to be an ongoing argument in my inbox between Cory Doctorow and a senior Elsevier rep. Fortunately it's well outside my work hours so I'll just let this one carry on and get the popcorn for the morning.

Oh for goodness' sake. I feel much better on the new drugs but I am actually even more anemic now than last month. Looks like they're going to pump me full of IV iron to fix this, though. #ironman #pumpingiron

Tomorrow I begin in earnest training up the NeuralClassifier multi-class engine on the peer review corpus using our marked up training sample. I hope we have enough material to make this work without too much loss. Would be brilliant if so.

People who comment on posts about/reviews of indoor bike trainers saying "why don't you just ride outside?" are truly the worst kind of cycling people. With my hearing issues this is a really good way to get killed on the road.

Some more interesting results from our current corpus's "cited in common" list. The actual
#1 item that we found was Rawls's _A Theory of Justice_, cited by 21 books.

Amartya Sen's _Development as Freedom_ is next down the list with 15 titles.

Bourdieu's _Distinction_, the previous winner at a partial scan, moved down to 13 titles.

Amusingly, Bourdieu only just edges out "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", although I am sad to report that this is due to a bug in our parser.

Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy is up there

Also revisiting @Melinda_Baldwin's 2017 piece on the history of the introduction of refereeing/peer reviewing https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.3463

@Melinda_Baldwin perhaps one of my favourite parts of this article is the revelation that the "inventor of peer review", William Whewell, proposed that the written reports _be published_.

@Melinda_Baldwin didn't happen, of course

@Melinda_Baldwin also, LOL at 'Frequent referee Howard P. Robertson (1903–61) once suggested that a paper could be improved “if it were written in invisible ink.”'

Reading @AileenFyfe et al.'s fascinating "Managing the Growth of Peer Review at the Royal Society Journals, 1865-1965". Some really interesting stuff in here. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243919862868

@AileenFyfe “Our data show how that attitude to refereeing changed in the early twentieth century, as consulting at least one referee came to be seen as necessary for all papers published in the Society’s journals” (10)

@AileenFyfe "criticisms, focusing on the undeniable delays to publication and allegations of potential bias, may have been a public manifestation of unease with the silent changes in editorial policy" (10) [nothing new under the sun]

@AileenFyfe "whereas the Society’s secretaries had solicited around 100 referee reports per year in the late nineteenth century, they needed four times that many by the 1930s" (14)

@AileenFyfe “For mercy’s sake, don’t send me any more papers to referee for a long time! . . . If I get much more heavy refereeing like this, it is goodbye to any chance of doing real scientific work myself” (17). Know how this person felt.