Scholar Freedom goes live to the world on 28 Feb 2022 9am AEST. It is built for people who no longer wish to abide by the design and expectations of the current academic publishing system because they have experienced it negatively for any number of reasons ranging from racism and sexism to exorbitant open access fees. Stay tuned for the link.

Don’t be fooled with any naivety - universities exploit you with their eyes wide open and governments have been knowingly aiding them with their failure to intervene on the problem they began for decades. Get out quickly and use all of your amazing self to redefine what it means to be an academic.

Until you can see how bad it is, you cannot know how much fight you must put up. However small, how do you subvert universities and in doing so hold yourself to account?

When an ex-CFO from across the world makes time for you and tells you your idea is good, you know you’re on the right life path. One piece of advice was to begin small by crowdfunding the prototype. A small donation each from a sea of people desperate for change in the way academic publishing currently works can change the world. We each make the system. We each can change it.

This Special Issue on sexism in academic promotions attracted submissions from unsilent women whose professional titles either do not reflect their true professional wisdom or were awarded far too late. Academia must stop hurtling at its toxic pace, and really ask itself what it is doing to its people and in the name of what.

Leaving academia was my act of radical self-care as an intersectional feminist, but I couldn’t see it at the time being clouded in deep grief of deep rejection by a system not designed to see the labour of women of colour. I’ve just read a workbook helping me reclaim who did the final rejecting, and with it restoration.

I taught students under the jacaranda tree to harness the power of nature as we learned together. I took my shoes off to resist the corporate image of what an academic is supposed to look like.

I’m full of self-delusion as much as the next person, so I have to be careful when I make such an accusation. I hope I can be as open to someone helping me as I wish university executives were open to mine.

First there was rest. Then there was grief and loss. Now there is joy to liberation. The pandemic made me take a voluntary redundancy. How grateful I am.

Imagine thinking you'll just stop in the middle of your lecture to throw up a few times if you need to and then carry on. This is the toxicity of academia.

Do you feel valued, supported, recognised, respected, heard, and remunerated? If no, maybe keep a time diary.

Has it always been there or am I just tuning in?! Leaders who serve their employees quietly bear a load so big it could easily be missed, overlooked, or not seen. They need a lot of celebratory noise made about them.

It’s not a fancy building universities need to put money away for. It’s the Royal Commission and class action that are coming. Being an institution seen to uphold knowledge, truth, and integrity, even falling for the rhetoric, increases delusion among management they’re not. They (think they) are good people. They make harmful decisions. Neoliberal universities perpetrate psychological and financial abuse. Some justice will be asked for back.

A nap can work wonders! From today's, I've played with ideas about how the current defunct peer review system can be disbanded and replaced with structural processes that align with the purpose of science - to let scholars talk about what they did, what they found, and what they think it means. Ego, prestige, and money are silencing voices that could really matter to someone else.

Staff all across the world are speaking out against injustice. It’s a vitriolic tirade. They face false accusations they are bringing universities into disrepute. Actually, that one’s on them.

One in ten permanent academic staff are now set to go. Will you be one of them? Is the cold on the inside better for you than the cold on the outside?

Universities expect integrity of staff, but staff now know not to expect it back. They’ve wisened and toughened. But who will pay for that?

The gap between universities’ rhetoric for nurturing intellect and their reality of chasing fast cash is a crack that hurts women more.

Every publication that makes my list longer actually gives me joy for the tangible stock-take it represents of where my brain and heart met at that point in my life.

Why do university decision-makers forget they wanted the same thing as us? … Timely recognition as a boost to keep going.