One of the earliest articles that I wrote during the final year of my Ph.D. was for the journal C21 , published by Gylphi. The article is quite hard to track down now as the online presence is being reworked and the front-list has moved to the Open Library of Humanities. I had no funding for gold open access at that time, nor did the publisher have a green arrangement in place.

The most recent Royal Historical Society document on Plan S says the following about the Open Library of Humanities (OLH): “It fails, however, to reference or explore the funding base that has made these important initiatives both possible and (to date) sustainable.

Last week, while I was having blood products transfused at the Royal Free Hospital, I received an email from the Leverhulme Trust stating that I had been awarded the 2019 Philip Leverhulme Trust Prize in Literary Studies.

From around 2010 to 2013 I was on a drug called Rituximab to control my autoimmune conditions (rheumatoid arthritis and vasculitis). This highly effective medication targets b-cells and destroys autoimmune responses by disabling parts of the immune system. After a few years of treatment, though, my immunoglobulin levels were extremely low and it was decided that Rituximab was no longer safe for me. I was moved to tocilizumab.

A Learned Society spoke to me last week about what they could do to move to an open-access model. They currently receive about 100,000 EUR per year from their subscription/hybrid-OA publisher but were willing to jettison this (!) if they could go OA with no author fees. The problem was that implementing a new business model was a total pain.

After last week’s post on APCs, some further musings. Following Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s work on generous thinking and the importance of community for the academy, I was advocating for the importance of the mission-driven nature of the publishers that we choose infrastructurally to support. Imagine a scenario, though: a for-profit publisher makes 37% profit.

Every five minutes or so, someone tries to come up with a cost-per-article figure for academic publishing. In the past, I’ve tried to do it too. But more and more I find myself wanting to resist the temptation. Not only because the data collection takes forever, but because the figures that I would produce, from my organisation, would likely not be cross-applicable to another organisation.

There’s an article out in The Times Higher Education Science Magazine (edit 11:38am) about Learned Societies and open access. As usual, it points out the thorny problem that Learned Societies derive revenue from subscriptions that they fear will be lost under an OA model. A few points spring to mind on this. 1. There is no guarantee that moving to an OA model will cause a loss of revenue;

Here’s an interesting one for me. The article processing charge (APC) model for open access is attracting a lot of flack. It’s being called the “scourge” of the scholarly communications world and is criticized for perpetuating global epistemic inequality. I think this is right in many ways. It’s why I co-founded the Open Library of Humanities, to show that other models are possible and more equitable.

Sci-Hub is a copyright-violating site that provides infringing access to scholarly publications that are behind paywalls. Its ethics are problematic but it’s also proving very difficult to stop. I learned this morning that the largest scholarly publisher in the world, Elsevier, sent a legal threat to Citationsy for linking to Sci-Hub.