Do you think that the Subscribe-To-Open model could be applied to new academic presses who have no backlist? Yes. The Open Library of Humanities, which I run, does not have a backlist but works on this model. It’s a great deal of work to set up and articulating the value proposition is more challenging, but it’s still doable. Thank you for your presentation. You mention usage from 129 different countries during spring 2020.

I love my Moog Minitaur synth. It’s a great little bass station that packs a punch. However, I have been facing some issues using its full functionality. Namely, there’s a software plugin that enables you to tweak all the settings from the DAW. It controls the synth over midi via USB.

I was thinking idly today – and probably in a wildly unoriginal way – about some of the disputes about subscriptions to software and the politics of this model. It’s no secret that Richard Stallman, perhaps the core philosopher of the open-source software movement, is a problematic figure, most recently so in his comments about Marvin Minsky.

A friend chucked me an old Crumar Bit99 synthesizer from the 1980s. It’s a beast! Lovely bass sounds. Totally unusable interface. See figure A. However, when I received it, the unit was in a bad state. Terrible fuzzy white noise sound along with every note. It sounded as though it was totally wrecked. It’s actually, though, very easy to restore.

Non-vulnerable people perhaps don’t understand why the government advice to shielders is so frightening. I think I can give a flavour though: Shielding is to be eased on the 1st April. Nobody in the “extremely clinically vulnerable” group – whom the virus would likely kill – will have had their second jab by this point. Infection levels are still around 5,000-6,000 new cases per day, nationwide. This is not low.

I have to admit, today, that I was wrong about the risk of others reprinting open-access monographs produced under a Creative Commons license. An outfit called “Saint Philip Street Press” has reprinted (on demand) the entire catalogues of Open Book Publishers, Ubiquity Press, UCL Press, and others. Here’s my Literature Against Criticism for sale, for instance.

I have, this afternoon (on a day off – I know, I know) been playing around with the LRB archive, looking for fun patterns in the chain of “who reviews whom”. Some preliminary thoughts… If, in careerist terms, essay writing is a network that is about social mobility, concerned with how authors affiliate themselves with one another, then we can possibly understand a little how the industry works – and how writers’ careers benefit – by

The Publisher’s Association has commissioned a report that seems to be their latest attempt at painting open access to research as economically damaging to the publishing sector.

Today I have written to the University of Leicester tendering my resignation as an external examiner. The text of resignation is below: Dear Professor Canagarajah, I write, following my previous correspondence of the 22nd January, to tender my resignation as an external examiner in the department of English at the University of Leicester. I wish to reiterate the concerns that I made in that email, to which I have had no response.

This morning I had to have a call with our accountants that I was somewhat dreading: does Brexit have tax implications for the Open Library of Humanities, a company limited by guarantee with charitable objects (a UK charity)? An important point about our model: OLH is not a supply.