Scholarly communication specialist and researcher at Cambridge University Libraries and King's College Cambridge. Associate of Cambridge Digital Humanities.
Book underway for University of Michigan Press on open access publishing and the commons.
Researching: academic publishing, open research, community governance, digital commons
"The capacity to produce scholarly-sounding discourse might no longer suffice as a form of professional defence when bureaucracy can generate equivalent-seeming scholarslop at scale. In response, academics will need to find new means to defend the university and contest the use of scholarslop before it is too late."
https://stunlaw.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-coming-threat-of-algorithmic-idea.html?m=1
"[W]e must work step by step, in an organizational way, toward direct control of universities. If we do, we’ll be of real use to our knowledge allies—government scientists, public health advocates, local news journalists, community researchers, theater company directors, et al.—in building the self-governing knowledge systems we need to block authoritarian implosion and get a future we want."
https://www.publicbooks.org/academics-must-seize-the-means-of-knowledge-production/
Reflections on Radical Open Access III: From Openness to Social Justice Activism
Read the write-up of the last @RadicalOA event by @Rebekka_Kie including videos and the event pamphlet.
Publish, Review, Curate: Turning scholarly publishing on its head
Register now for our in-person event in Cambridge on December 3rd co-organised by the Open Research team at Cambridge and the Confederation of Open Access Repositories. Programme to follow!
Publish, Review, Curate: Turning scholarly publishing on its head
Register now for our in-person event in Cambridge on December 3rd co-organised by the Open Research team at Cambridge and the Confederation of Open Access Repositories. Programme to follow!
"No, I don't hate the printing press. What I object to is the use of slogans based on fairy tales. But "the printing press democratized knowledge" is not just a fairy tale; when you actually think about the words being used next to one another, they don't make the sense they are purported to make."
Last call for papers for #OpenScience Conference FOR2026! ⏰ ‼️ The deadline is tomorrow night - all of you who practice, study or govern Open Research, please submit an abstract and join us in Munich in May 2026 - it’s the best time to be in the city and a great opportunity to foster responsible and equitable open research. All details here: https://opensciencestudies.eu/for-2026-conference/
Hi, I've moved over to hcommons.social, so here's an #introduction. I work (and make things) at the nexus of digital culture, politics and technology. I'm Prof of Media at Coventry University, UK, where I direct the Centre for Postdigital Cultures. I research non-liberal & non-humanist forms of collaboration and knowledge commons, as well as questions of class, elitism & digital capitalism. I’ve been involved for a while in creating ‘norm-critical’ collaborative research contexts. In 1999 I started an online journal Culture Machine http://www.culturemachine.net/. In 2006 I co-founded the open access publishing house Open Humanities Press. OHP was then a founder member of the Radical Open Access Collective http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk/. My books include A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works In Elitist Britain (OHP, 2021) http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/a-stubborn-fury/, Pirate Philosophy (MIT Press, 2016) https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262034401/pirate-philosophy/, and The Uberfication of the University (Minnesota UP, 2016) https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/the-uberfication-of-the-university.
Cambridge University Library Podcast: The Mystery of Darwin’s Stolen Notebooks
Jim Secord interviewed about the missing (and later returned) notebooks.
@marcellaflamme I've been thinking (with Janneke) about this question over the weekend too. I agree about the importance of not (overly) standardising or professionalising scholar-led publishing. I think this is a problem with how funders are approaching the diamond ecosystem -- as something that needs to be self-sustaining and competitive with traditional publishers.
Great discussion with Marcel Wrzesinski today about 🇩🇪 efforts to support #ScholarLed OA. How do we move beyond short-term funding cycles to institutionalize (but not necessarily professionalize)?
“Intellectual property theft crimes deprive their victims of both ingenuity and hard-earned revenue"
Not that I'm expecting much from the FBI but this quote is completely meaningless.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/20/23469142/feds-arrest-russians-z-library-pirated-ebooks
'This was one of Davis’s set pieces – taking the greenhorns down an overflow pipe for the LA River, and ending, if things went smoothly, with the car flying out of the pipe clean through the air, crashing down on the concrete sides of a vast dry gulch.'
Nice piece on Mike Davis by T. J. Clark in the London Review of Books
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n22/t.j.-clark/on-mike-davis
Join us for the HK online panel (in English) on 28/11 12.00 CET-
instilling an undertow: micro-autonomous art practices and inquiries around P2P
Speakers: Linda Chiu-han Lai, Winnie Soon, Display Distribute, Yang Jing, Kwan Q Li
Organizer: Zimu Zhang , Assistant: Liu Lei
Host: the Institute of Network Society, School of Inter-media Art, China Academy of Art
I'm curating a list of UK institutions with rights retention policies.
https://github.com/sje30/rrs/blob/main/ukinstitutions.csv
Have I missed any? (hoping this list will grow ...)
'Prestigious institutions receive far more funding, which equates to more available research labor, and, in disciplines with collaboration norms, that labor advantage drives greater faculty productivity via coauthorship'.
This is a really interesting paper on the relationship between prestige and productivity that confirms what, I assume, is for most people self-evident because of how co-authorship works in the sciences. Not to take anything away from it, but the paper uses so many terms that are definitionally up for grabs ('prestige', 'productivity', 'authorship') that a serious ethico-political analysis is really needed to supplement this work.
*Writing as a critical-theoretical researcher who may have completely misunderstood the conclusions because I'm out of my intellectual depth.
First Toot from the Open Research teams at #CambridgeUniversity! We’d love to find more #CambridgeResearchers to follow as we start to build our new community here. We’ll post about #OpenResearch #OpenScholarship #OpenScience
@niamhpage yeah, I completely agree about the town/gown angle. I think it's a hugely knotty problem that will invariably cause pain however it's done, but I do hope they find a way to fund better services and reduce the number of cars in the city.
Very cool article on the #opensource #openaccess work @eLife has been working on https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/b6a249af/technology-at-elife-10-years-of-innovation
