This week for our COPIM reading group we are reading Hartley, John, Jason Potts, Lucy Montgomery, Ellie Rennie, and Cameron Neylon, ‘Do We Need to Move from Communication Technology to User Community?

This week for our COPIM reading group we are turning to Osterwalder, Alexander, Yves Pigneur, and Tim Clark, Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010). Part of what we are doing is thinking through the different business models that can support open publication of monographs and figuring out how to implement these on the ground.

Transformative agreements for OA are all the rage at the moment. Plan S compliance beckons and early movers can make it sound as though they are really doing what’s needed. Yet we’re at a very difficult time with the global pandemic of COVID-19. Library budgets are likely to contract as institutions come under financial strain.

This week for COPIM we are reading Bardzell, Shaowen, Jeffrey Bardzell, Jodi Forlizzi, John Zimmerman, and John Antanitis, ‘Critical Design and Critical Theory: The Challenge of Designing for Provocation’, in Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference, DIS ’12 (Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom: Association for Computing Machinery, 2012), pp. 288–297 <https://doi.org/10.1145/2317956.2318001>. This paper is on the

This week, our COPIM WP2/WP3 reading group discussed Meunier, Benjamin, and Olaf Eigenbrodt, ‘More Than Bricks and Mortar: Building a Community of Users Through Library Design’, Journal of Library Administration , 54.3 (2014), 217–32 <https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2014.915166>. We were interested to consider the implications of participatory design in library architecture for new digital infrastructures.

One of the oft-repeated adages in the scholarly communications world is that ‘the money is in the system’, it’s just badly distributed. This is one of the core problems with APCs; they don’t distribute funds in a similar way to subscriptions, so even if we could afford it, we still have a problematic distribution. What if this isn’t true, though, that the level of funding will remain the same?

Today, I read Andrew Elfenbein’s The Gist of Reading (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018). By any account, this is a provocative and stimulating read that brings observations from cognitive psychology to bear on literary critical concerns. Predominantly concerned with nineteenth-century novels in his examples, Elfenbein nonetheless draws out a broad theoretical framework that I believe has far wider consequences.

A famous line from Jurassic Park (1993) is that ‘[y]our scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should’. I felt much the same, today, reading J. M. Hawker’s Capital Letters: The Economics of Academic Bookselling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) <https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675376>. For the aptly named Hawker tells us, the ‘core purpose of both

Museums continue to make life miserable for academic scholars who wish to re-use their images in third-party publications. I am not against paying museums license fees for images they have digitized, although I believe that Simon Tanner has shown that the overheads of running a licensing department can outweight the actual revenue, against footfall/exposure etc.

I have just finished editing a book collection in which Robin de Mourat, Donato Ricci, and Bruno Latour ask: how does a format make a public?