Always important to remember how much the original Coalition was a very specifically EU initiative (and how important are e.g. RELX and Springer as European economic agents). Recent changes in emphasis have been a sign of impotence, ultimately, and not the converse. But let’s see what happens next..

A good and powerful piece although tbh I have lost count of the number of times I have been told that a revolution in schol comm is coming. The UK is often presumed to have far greater global heft with the likes of RELX and Springer than it really does - see e.g. latest SN numbers announced today.

Yep. It was always a quasi-governmental project with specific EU purposes and motivations in mind (and of course within the EU RELX and Springer etc remain major economic agents). The shift towards Diamond OA & AHSS was a sign of weakness ultimately, given the original ambitions of the Coalition...

St Anne’s College Oxford and then taught English at St Paul’s Girls and Oxford High.

He is. Many thanks R

Our little terrier Ivan has been shivering on the sofa for 30 minutes during the big civic Cambridge display - about a KM away. Calming down now…

Cathy O N went on to teach English at St Paul’s and Oxford High and amongst many other distinctions used to have Olivia Newton John as a babysitter. Network of Aussie academic families in Cambridge…

Totally accept and get that but I still think the politics of all this are vv complex. HE as a set of networks and financial commitments is massively misunderstood by those not immediately impacted and the wider media is always (oddly) disengaged. Utter lack of interest in e.g. current redundancies.

True. But ‘politicians’ carry a lot here. Don’t you mean ‘the electorate’ more generally? I know that public views of HE are often at best confused…but would e.g. removal of the triple lock to help support students find popular support? A genuine question.

Very pleased to see that you have now been promoted to ‘world’s foremost expert’ status 🤗

Mind you, there was a time when this almost UKRI policy too. Less research, but all of it Open Access, was pretty much the message at points in the 2010s...

Complete 100% agreement.

Still think that my old model from a decade or so ago of the progress of Open Access in the UK as the academic equivalent of the English Reformation has a lot to commend it. Initially radical movements subsumed by the state for its own particular ends, supported by other powerful actors who benefit.

A very Oakeshottian sentiment!

Many of the threatened cases of libel tourism in the academic domain have been with publishers, ultimately, rather than individual academic authors.

Agreed, although there was a slightly pleasing juxtaposition of this letter with a quite acute and cool review of the recent Sisman biography of dad Asa’s life by Colin Kidd in the same issue of the Observer…

I think that is the point. Honestly don’t quite get why Rick’s post has provoked such reactions, when it seems to describe pretty well the reality of many transatlantic universities where ‘transforming schol comm’ is not of itself an immediate institutional priority. Rightly or wrongly.