Aileen Fyfe

Oh! Lots of goodies here, starting with Bill Jenkins on David Brewster #histSTM edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-david-b...

Scottish county politics between the 1832 and 1868 Scottish Reform Acts Last month Durham University, supported by the History of Parliament, hosted the Histories of Scottish Politics in the Age of Union, c.1700-1945 conference. At the conference, Dr Martin Spychal, a …

For #StAndrewsDay we are sharing @martinspychal.bsky.social's recent post on Scottish county politics between 1832 and 1868, drawing on @histparl.bsky.social's research on Scotland’s constituencies: victoriancommons.wordpress.com/2024/08/27/s...

Teaching Slavery Teaching Slavery offers ground-breaking research and practical guidance for teaching Britain’s role in transatlantic slavery. Combining historical analysis with classroom strategies, it equips educato...

Congratulations to Katie Donington, Abdul Mohamud, Robin Whitburn, Nicholas Draper and their contributors! Their #OpenAccess book Teaching Slavery published today. Read and download free at: bit.ly/48vnDdJ #Education #Colonialism #Slavery #Racism

Black and Political: Reconstructing Black Participation in British Politics, 1750-1850

Looking forward to Helen Wilson speaking on Reconstructing Black Participation in British Politics, 1750-1850, to a joint session of @long18thsem.bsky.social and the Parliaments, Politics and People seminar @ihrlibrary.bsky.social All welcome, but please register at www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

the call is now open for our next round of @iashedinburgh.bsky.social Heritage Collections Research Fellows! - find out more here:

www.iash.ed.ac.uk/heritage-col...

Money, Time, Trust, Control – How commercial publishers drain science - Impact of Social Sciences Have the interests of commercial publishers now become antithetical to the pursuit of knowledge?

👀ICYMI: "if the drain has a particular history and geography, it means that it is not inevitable. It can be resisted."

#AcademicSky #HigherEd #ScholComm

Nominations are open for the BSHS Pickstone Prize 2026, recognising the best scholarly English-language book in the history of science.
📆 Deadline: 31 Jan 2026.
Anyone may nominate (self-nominations welcome).
Submit via our online form on the BSHS website www.bshs.org.uk/the-bshs-pic...

CFP: BAVS 2026 Conference Liverpool BAVS Liverpool 202627 – 29 July 2026 Keynote Speakers: Dr Alison Chapman (University of Victoria, BC), others to be confirmed. The Centre for Modern and Contemporary History (CMCH) at Liverpool Joh…

It’s lovely to see our BAVS CFP out. If you research/teach any aspect of the Victorian period (broadly defined) do consider joining us! You can submit a paper, roundtable, creative workshops/ pedagogical paper. We really are open to a wide range of talks! victorianist.wordpress.com/2025/10/20/c...

Cricket in the Commons: a Victorian First Eleven - The History of Parliament With the 2025 Ashes between England and Australia getting underway this week, we have a cricketing themed post from our House of Commons, 1832-1945 project.

With this years Ashes beginning in the early hours of this morning, we thought we'd point you in the direction of @TheVictCommons where they explore the link between cricket and the Victorian House of Commons

historyofparliament.com/2025/11/20/c...

Fabulous PhD opportunity at Queen's University Belfast and Armagh Observatory:

Observing the Heavens from the 'Periphery': Astronomy in Ireland 1640-1830

www.qub.ac.uk/courses/post... Deadline 13 Jan #histSTM #histastro

@standrewshist.bsky.social

Money, Time, Trust, Control – How commercial publishers drain science - Impact of Social Sciences Have the interests of commercial publishers now become antithetical to the pursuit of knowledge?

💥New: Money, Time, Trust, Control – How commercial publishers drain science

✍️ @danbrockington.bsky.social @aileenfyfe.bsky.social @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca

#AcademicSky #ScholComm #AcademicPublishing

A new installation on ‘Medical alumni in history’ has been unveiled at the School of Medicine. It was designed and installed by our recent PhD graduate – and historian of medicine – @manoncwilliams.bsky.social, and features notable alumni from 19th and 20th century St Andrews. (1/3)

It's brilliant to have helped put some history on the walls in Medicine, with these panels showcasing a selection of 19thC and 20thC alumni - including the first women, and the first students of Indian and African heritage. Congratulations to @manoncwilliams.bsky.social @standrewshist.bsky.social

With thanks to the wonderful team @hansonmark.bsky.social
@lariviev.bsky.social @paolocrosetto.bsky.social @gemmaderrick.bsky.social @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca
@pagomba.bsky.social @stephenpinfield.bsky.social @jameswilsdon.bsky.social and @danbrockington.bsky.social [7/7]

For more on the drain, see our preprint at arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 and this infographic: zenodo.org/records/1759...

They show us all that there are other ways of doing things (in academia, and in publishing).

Especially when researchers, academic institutions and funders work together. [5/n]

Research institutions and research publishing practices have developed differently in other geographical/linguistic regions. In some places, alternative publishing models have survived or (with new tech) been created. Think: SciELO, Redalyc, and Érudit. [4/n]

For me, as a historian, I was struck by the extent to which the dominant discourse around 'academic publishing and its problems' is really about 'academic publishing in the global north and/or the anglo-sphere' - and is a consequence of the specific history of those regions.

This is not simply about the dominance of a few large for-profit publishers, but about the entire system of hyper-competitive, publication-metric-obsessed academia that has emerged in the last 50 years or so. [2/n]

Think about the way that the current scientific publishing system is draining resources out of the research ecosystem... That drain is most obvious in terms of money (and this is so despite #openaccess), but there's also an erosion of time, trust and control [1/n]

It is clear what we need. It is to re-communalise academic publishing. Its costs funding are met by learned societies and their funders; profits go back to research, as do the data it generates. Researchers repeatedly call for this. tinyurl.com/bdekus68rofits

I'd suggest that there's also a difference between giving your time by refereeing for a professional/disciplinary society that you believe to be a Good Thing, and giving your time by refereeing for a for-profit publisher. The latter situation has become more common than it was.

So frustrating when that happens! (I spent some time on the history of the Royal Society's code of conduct for fellows... and then that story got shunted off the agenda by something else. Grr.)

"Publish (in English) or Perish", mythe ou réalité institutionnelle? Découvrabilité | La littérature révèle l'existence d'une perception répandue parmi les chercheur·euses d'une obligation de publier en anglais pour assurer la progression de leur carrière. Mais d’où vi...

"Publish (in English) or Perish", mythe ou réalité institutionnelle? www.acfas.ca/publications...

Postdoc research fellowship (NOT a 2-yr teaching fellowship). Both because of the lack of jobs for recent PhDs, but also because you might get to collaborate with that postdoc, and that might be fun.

Lack of female representation in memorial/statue landscape Lack of female representation in memorial/statue landscape, contributed by Royal Museums Greenwich.

'Since the Lloyd’s Register Foundation reported in 2018 that fewer than 3% of statues in the UK were of real, non-royal women, several campaigns aimed at documenting and achieving greater gender representation in public art have gained a foothold.' 2/2

New Academy report showcases the contemporary relevance of the UK’s social sciences – Academy of Social Sciences

Neat new report from @acadsocsciences.bsky.social on the value of social science to society
acss.org.uk/news/new-aca...

Scholarly publishing’s hidden diversity: How exclusive databases sustain the oligopoly of academic publishers Global scholarly publishing has been dominated by a small number of publishers for several decades. This paper revisits the data on corporate control of scholarly publishing by analyzing the relative ...

Also: language. The big for-profits have been most influential in regions where English-language publishing is (or has become) common. @lariviev.bsky.social and colleagues have some fascinating results on the 'hidden diversity' in scholarly publishing, beyond the anglosphere doi.org/10.1371/jour...

True! But I think what is different now (say, 1990s on) is that referees are working in a hyper-competitive environment, juggling institutional demands for more and more (in research, teaching, impact, service), with performance management metrics... Research time is much more pressured than before