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.
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](https://www.publishers.org.uk/publications/economic-impact-assessment/) 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](/images/Resignation.pdf). 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.
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](/2015/04/24/gearing-up-for-olh-in-the-uk-and-the-resolution-to-the-vat-question/). Because, in our model, we do not charge anybody for a direct service provision,
This week opened with the distressing news that Lord Sumption, supposedly someone whose judgement is entirely sound, having been a Supreme Court justice, had told a cancer sufferer live on air that [her life was less valuable than others](https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/jan/17/jonathan-sumption-cancer-patient-life-less-valuable-others). Pretty disgusting stuff that, to me, seems to show a type of thinking that is similar to eugenics;
I am due up for vaccination in the very near future. This is good news. But it's tempered.
A discourse of 'fairness' has emerged in open-access circles in recent years. It has come from a sense that big, for-profit publishers have not played 'fairly' with libraries over the past 30 years. It is unsurprising. These large publishers make margins of 35%+ on billions of dollars of revenue, even while library budgets stagnate.
There was some research earlier this year that I thought was apt for the pandemic, showing that [realism is key to being happy](https://theconversation.com/why-realism-is-the-key-to-wellbeing-new-research-139717), not optimism or pessimism.
On the same day as I [submitted my next book manuscript](https://eve.gd/2021/01/03/i-have-submitted-the-warez-book/), I am pleased to be able to say that [Reading Peer Review](https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/reading-peer-review/42F027E4C67D246DD8C3AC440A68C7A7), my 7 th academic book, has been published by Cambridge University Press.
I have, today, submitted the manuscript of my book, currently titled _Warez: The Economic Aesthetics and Alternative Reality Games of the Topsite Scene_ to the publisher!
