"Guessing the identity of anonymous referees just seems like an activity with very little upside. If you guess wrong (which you are likely to do despite your convictions to the contrary), you may wrongly believe that someone is “against you.” You will never know whether you have guessed right and even if you have, how useful is that information really? Obviously, people will continue to do it anyway. All I can say is that you should leave open the possibility that you are wrong even if your identification of the referee seems obvious given your working assumptions about how referees write their reports."

"That attitude carried on to seduce academic libraries and graduate English courses, where students were made to believe that Hugo and Dostoevsky, Maugham and Conrad had not written crime and spy novels. The virus still flourishes in our schools and cultural institutions; our self-appointed guardians of culture still leave genre writers off the literary tea guest lists. She writes mysteries, my dear, she'll show up reeking of gin. Or you get: He writes thrillers? How crass. It's so American.

"Popular fiction" has become a term of vulgar connotation, but it reeks of ironic paradox: obviously we sobersided Canadians ought to be reading unpopular fiction. (As an aside, reflecting an antithetical American attitude, I once got a rejection from a publisher down there who complained a manuscript was "too literary for the genre.")"

"We need more than the passive ideal of easy access to published knowledge; we need the active ideal of improved methodologies for advancing knowledge. In the Enlightenment Francis Bacon had the boldness to call for a Novum Organum, a "new instrument" of knowledge (in contrast to Aristotle's old Organum); similarly, we must devise new instruments of knowledge to match our cyber environment. Ours is a knowledge revolution on par with the introduction of empirical research itself or even the codification of the scientific method. But are we conceptualizing and establishing the new methodologies to the same degree that we are fighting for the free circulation of traditional materials? We are not. That's why we need Scholarly Inquiry Optimization."

"The art of conversation, with its counterpart the dialogue as a literary form for presenting ideas, has also declined since the days of Galileo, while the art of advertising has advanced. Advertising is easily recognized as the literary form that most completely responds to the technique of the printing press, because it demands, above all else, a numerous and receptive "public" of readers. A great number of improvements in the graphic arts have been adaptations to the needs of advertisers. Yet, in its development of "direct mail" methods and circular letters, advertising seems to be more emancipated than literature from the printing press. One of the most curious recent developments in the graphic arts is the effort of the advertisers to make printed matter look like typescript, while the authors of books that are not in sufficient demand to warrant publication are seeking a typescript that will look like print."

"A buccaneer-scholar is anyone whose love of learning is not muzzled, yoked or shackled by any institution or authority; whose mind is driven to wander and find its own voice and place in the world."

"... Their procedures took the physical object as the unit of reproduction. Because the Barrett copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was collected in the form that it was, I photographed each newspaper number within it in order. When it came time to plan my own digital project, which included a facsimile reproduction of the Barrett object and a transcription of Stowe’s text, I had multiple choices. But I had already completed a digital reproduction of the Barrett object that included photographs of covers, end papers, and the pages of numbers that lacked installments of Stowe’s text. The theory, I would submit, is an effort to deal thoughtfully with an institutional procedure of reproduction that contrasted with my own interest in the transcription. Had I been in charge of the reproduction–not forced to engage against institutional practices–I might well have decided to reproduce only those pages that include Stowe’s text..."

"...How are such things as editions, states, variants, or even the book itself to be discussed? To what extent is a printed book singular? And to what extent does the (inaccurate) scholarly assumption that it is not, enable reasonable and useful discussion of such objects to proceed?"

One wants to know how set boundaries may be made fluid again. One wants, I think, to let people do what they enjoy. There are enough of us for that.

Entire print run of Journal of Cel Science available online for free.

Any academic authors care to join a collective action?

If the AAP represented me, I would fire and disavow. Right now. Damned morons.

A good appraisal. "Grow up, people. Smile, put on your grownup undies, and stop throwing good money down the rathole of an already-lost fight."

"What they showed was that faculty with earlier surname initials were disproportionately positively represented among tenured faculty at top ten economics departments..."

"Books have led some to learning, and others to madness..."

"[A] lot of scholarly writing in the humanities and some social sciences uses citation as a marker of institutional sociology, as a performance of intellectual identity, as an affect of authority rather than the substance of it."

Small, swarming doses of scholarship. Are they <i>still</i> scholarly, then? Or something utterly different?

I'm slower. I hadn't heard about the anti-Moretti backlash.

"It is now de rigueur to praise a scholar's erudition and generosity of wisdom; but without the smart snide correctives of play and battle, without the threat of being one-upped, without the contest, that joyous and accepting refusal which might align the

Me, I do email and play word games.

"...Off campus, about nine percent and on campus, about thirty-eight percent of links led to text that could be opened directly, without barriers."