What does a top secret stealth submarine have in common with Edward Snowden's revelations about Internet snooping? How do you "snoop" on the Internet anyway, and what does it look like to the snooper? These are questions you'll struggle to find answers to in the mainstream media, but fear not - I'll cover them and more in today's super soaraway post!

In a couple of weeks' time I'll be one of the plenary speakers at this year's Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2013). My talk is called The Inside-Out University. It's about how we adapt to a new world where publications, research data and educational resources are open by default, and the catalytic role of the web community. Read on for more... NB: Last call for IWMW bookings is Monday June 17th!

In a few days' time we'll be holding the first of our imaginatively titled Doughnuts and HPC sessions.  Modelled on the Open Data Institute's ODI Fridays, the idea is that we set aside an hour over lunch for people to discuss our latest HPC backed research. This will be a great opportunity to find out more about what the person down the corridor is doing, and we hope that it will lead to all kinds of new interdisciplinary collaborations.  All that, and doughnuts too!

As part of the HPC Midlands project, we've been developing a series of case studies about the work that we are doing with our industrial collaborators around supercomputing. Here's the latest one, about our joint project with TATA Steel to model the welding process at the atomic scale. We'll post further case studies both here and on the case studies section of the HPC Midlands website.

I've blogged in the past about our Research Data Management project and the Higher Education sector's transition to being Open by Default (through Open Access Publications, Research Data and Open Educational Resources). This work is coming on nicely, and we now have a draft institutional policy (developed by my colleague Sue Manuel) that I'd welcome your feedback on. This still has to be further crunched over at an institutional level for formal approval, but it incorporates lots of good ideas from our discussions with other institutions, and I think we're pretty much where we need to be.