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February 2020

Almost dived in on an "am I misunderstanding something or is the UKRI OA mandate going to ruin the world? Is my career over?" thread with a "yes, you clearly know nothing about this and haven't read anything on it" answer. Then realised there are better ways to spend Saturday.

I love that news broadcasters think that the most important thing we want to know about coronavirus is the damage it is doing to the stock market.

Just been auditing a recent selection of recent job adverts put out by my institution to ensure that we have DORA adherence as per our signature and that nobody is asking for Impact Factors etc. It has gone well!

unlike my recent ability to type, which is now inserting the word "recent" multiple times into every recent post.

Excited to see the cover for Edward Jackson's book in the series I edit with @CheyetteBryan, New Horizons in Contemporary Writing: David Foster Wallace's Toxic Sexuality: Hideousness, Neoliberalism, Spermatics.

@CheyetteBryan @AliceMarwick's doing, I believe!

There's a new TurnItIn tool called Authorship that looks to fingerprint documents and assess whether they were written by the same student. This is highly dubious both ethically but also technically.

for full details, see my published works

Drat. As we draw to the close of a successful couple of hack days, I hit a last-minute frustration where the Crossref deposit API doesn't behave as we'd expect for funder data, so project won't now be completed until I hear back from Crossref support. Boo.

Can anyone please point me to the best way to expose funder metadata in a standard format? I.e. we want to expose machine readable versions of funding metadata in addition to the human-readable version (see pic) but can't easily see any good examples of people doing this.

Today, the last day before strikes begin at Birkbeck, I will finish the Plan S requirement of storing & exposing robust funding data in Janeway. Have a great link to Crossref's Fundref API built in. Been fun setting aside two days & getting my hands dirty on the code again.

Birkbeck is not on strike today with these due to start on Monday, so the Janeway tech team are hard at it. I am implementing FundRef search and metadata for Janeway Plan S compliance.

Working on a book that examines the essential badness or brokenness of many digital-textual metaphors and generous readers have come up with a brilliant idea for a final, counterfactual chapter where I imagine how other metaphors might have produced different technologies.

I think I've just read the stupidest thing of the morning. "Milling is a training activity in the British airborne infantry. For a fixed period, two opponents punch each other in the head as aggressively as possible without evasion."

Due to national strike action my talk on digital literary methods at Sheffield Hallam University in March has been cancelled.

Just read this: "I am yet to meet a researcher who says that access to articles is a big problem for them given the possibility of interlibrary loans." - researcher at a well-endowed university with a huge library

see also:

"can't publish in high-quality journals" disguised as concern when really selfishly worrying about prestige [CHECK]

Ploughing through a stack of 30-year old CDs here and trying to get totally accurate lossless rips off them. Majority are fine but a fair number are unsalvageable and just won't read. My CDs are rotting!

A tinge of sadness as I noted that the late Barrington Pheloung was, for the first time, not the soundtrack composer on a Morse series.

Looking forward to HE reshuffles where I am made Prof of Particle Physics for a week while someone from crystallography comes in to the lit department for a term.

New uni minister @michelledonelan: "I have always believed that everyone should have a fair shot at life and that this is impossible without a good education". I hope she will work to undo the damage to mature & part-time study in HE introduced and lamented by Willetts.

It's that "hilarious" time again when I make a meta-tweet about how I track the time it takes to fill in the Retrospective Time Allocation Survey.

Was quite pleased that we had a power cut for two minutes last night and I got to test graceful failures on uninterruptible power supply

I do love the 8am playbook from *Research: "On Friday, a senior Conservative politician once again chose the paywall of The Times as a platform from which to rebuke higher education over free speech."

I seem to remember the "audiences jumping out of their seats" thing re the Lumiere Brothers train film is a myth. But if it isn't, why would audiences? Camera placement is on the platform. Was it only spectators to the left who jumped out?

Was told by label boss I need some "dead cool" photos for future music promo stuff. Not sure I have pulled this off, despite @liannedemello's ace camera skills!

@liannedemello

@liannedemello

In addition to this morning's talk I have also delivered 25 copyedited chapters to 35 authors for our edited book; battled with the foes of inbox; and now I'm having a tea break.

I am losing the battle

Looking forward to chairing the first Open Research Working Group at @BirkbeckUoL of 2020. We will be discussing DORA, ORCID, REF OA, and more.

This is the week when we kick off the quite tricky coordination of production on /Reassembling Scholarly Communications/. Copyedits in tomorrow and then straight out to all 35 authors on a relatively harsh return timescale. Wish me luck!

About once per decade I am required to wear a dinner jacket and one month before this event I always dread checking whether the only DJ I own -- from when I was age 18 -- still fits. It does.

And the name's Bond. Premium Bond.