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?
This week for our COPIM project reading group we are turning to the forthcoming Stuart Lawson, ‘The Political Histories of UK Public Libraries and Access to Knowledge’, in Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access , ed. by Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020), pp. 161–72. This work is not yet published but will be openly accessible when it is,
As part of the COPIM project, my work packages are conducting some background reading groups. This week we are reading Susan Leigh Star, ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure’, American Behavioral Scientist , 43.3 (1999), 377–91 <https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326>. I had read this a long time ago but enjoyed revisiting it. I thought, in a spirit of openness, that I would share my notes on this article.
This bank holiday, I wanted to spend some time playing around with Zotero’s automatic ingest of open access books. There are some problems with this. For recap, Zotero offers users a way easily to ingest items using built-in metadata on a page. It supports Dublin Core, various RDF implementations, and COinS. Here’s the problem, though: if you want automatic lookup by ISBN, you have to use the COinS translator/provide COinS metadata.
Springer-Nature has a new report out on tracking APCs. Research Fortnight asked me to comment but didn’t use the full quote, so here are my thoughts on it: I think that the term ‘in the wild’ is slightly misleading/pointed for meaning that publishers were less easily able to track such payments.
Subscribe to Open is a model pioneered by Annual Reviews that basically says that if libraries continue to subscribe, the title will become OA. If libraries drop out, it goes back to being subscription. A good point that Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe brought to my attention is that this poses problems for the status of the title under Plan S provisions. Is this a type of hybrid publication?
In ultra-exciting news – thanks to my Leverhulme Prize – I am very pleased to be able to be able to say that my book, Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas , is now openly accessible (gold OA under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license) at Stanford University Press! It will soon be in the OAPEN Library and on the Stanford site, but for now it’s freely available in BIROn.
