The abstract for my talk at Congress 2015, in Ottawa: The economics of scholarly communications are complex. In fact, it could be said that there are two parallel economies that mirror each other: a symbolic economy of reputation or “prestige”, which is obvious and important to scholars, and a material economy that is most clear to the academic library.

It was with great pleasure that we announced, on Friday, that the OLH now has its first journal joining that has moved away from a subscription model to a pure gold OA basis. This makes me very happy. The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry is a niche publication in the humanities that holds great value to its target audience.

In February of this year Michael Chibnik published an editorial piece in American Anthropologist arguing that while he supported the idea of open access to the publication he also now thinks “that gold open access publication is unlikely to be feasible in the near future for AA”. This is a regrettable situation since, from the editorial, it does not appear that many options have been considered to achieve open access, despite the

Last weekend I wanted a break from my usual activities, so I decided to write myself some tools to automate a few tasks. One of these is to pull down QIF data from my bank so that I can import it into money management software (I know, I know: I go wild at weekends). I did a little bit on this a while back but I needed to refresh my memory.

I wrote yesterday, in a grumpy state, about the restrictiveness of copyright and licensing of screenshots in academic material. Today brings happier news. The ever-excellent Laura Quilter sent me the following advice: Contrary to my expectation – and contrary to the pessimism of many of my film scholar friends – my publisher agreed! Use of screengrabs should be deemed fair use.

Just a little anger/despair at the state of our cultural industries. The 1993 film, Demolition Man is 1hr 55mins in length. That means that, at 24fps, there are 165,600 frames in the film. No single one of those frames is a substitute for the film or would damage its commercial viability for Warner Bros through dissemination. Yes, yes, there’s probably an argument for fair use/dealing in an academic book.

The new Conservative government in the United Kingdom has promised to scrap the Human Rights Act. The rationale that they give for this centres around originalism (claiming that the HRA has been interpreted beyond its original scope) and national self-determination (the EU telling the UK government what laws it can pass). I remain worried about this.

Academic publishers come in all shapes and sizes. Some are commercial, some are mission-driven, some are not-for-profit. This creates an interesting dynamic for a market. Not-for-profit publishers see themselves as partners of the academy, working alongside their academic colleagues to disseminate material. Indeed, some university presses are departments of universities.

I am very pleased to announce that, as of today (1 ^st of May, 2015), I am now a Senior Lecturer in Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. I have greatly enjoyed my time at Lincoln and fully intend to stay in touch with the colleagues and friends that I have made there, whom I will sorely miss. That said, I am, of course, looking forward to the future.

A while ago, I wrote of the tricky situation potentially faced by UK OA publishers operating on a cost-pool basis/consortial basis. After our accountants gave a report on this about a month or so ago, I sought confirmation from HMRC that it was, indeed, the case that these models do not count as a direct supply of a service.