I have a series of book projects in train at the moment and wanted to write a little bit of this down so that I have a record of where I was in the projects at this stage: Eve, Martin Paul, and Jonathan Gray, eds., Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020) is currently in the final stages of production.
An interesting conceptual dilemma arose today. At OLH we don’t believe that print is incompatible with OA/the digital. (This is usually the part of the Skype call where I hold up my print copy of Literature Against Criticism from Open Book Publishers.) Some of our titles sell print copies at, say, the $40 mark for an issue. This covers the print costs and postage and very little else. Today we had a challenge with this.
One of the strongly recommended criteria under Plan S is that journals provide “Openly accessible data on citations according to the standards by the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC)”. This means, essentially, depositing citation data with Crossref and then marking it as open. This is a tricky task that will be outside of the ability of many smaller publishers.
Since yesterday’s post on The UKRI Open Access Review Consultation Document my inbox has been swamped by journalists, librarians, and publishers asking what the policy means for REF. The short answer is that, at the moment, it means nothing. ##What the review says Work funded just by REF (i.e. that acknowledges only unhypothecated QR awarded from the last REF) is not in scope for the OA policy.
These are my notes on The UKRI Open Access Review Consultation Document. The document informs but is not a policy for the REF-after-REF 2021. This document does not change the REF 2021 policy. For peer-reviewed research articles and conference proceedings with an ISSN the new policy proposed here would apply on and after 1 January 2022.
I am often asked for advice on writing data management plans in the humanities, so thought I would share my advice on this more generally. The first thing you need to do is to work out what “data” you are likely to collect or generate. Note that any manuscript you are writing should be considered as a digital data object. Sensitivity. How sensitive are the data? Do they identify living or dead people? What information do they reveal about them?
This is really speculative, but today I returned to David McClure’s excellent and fun TextPlot tool. A type of topic modelling (but not LDA), McClure explains his Bray-Curtis dissimilarity mapping in a separate post but essentially what is being measured here is the interconnectedness and proximity of various terms within a network graph.
I am tempted to think that Taylor & Francis’s acquisition of F1000 should be critiqued on grounds of yet more gross for-profit consolidation in the scholarly publishing ecosystem. I believe this is true. But funders won’t care. The EU wants to maintain its stance of market non-interference and I do not believe that the for-profit status of such entities bothers others like Wellcome or Gates.
Urgh. I had a RAID 6 reshape on my NAS that was projected to take 28 days to complete, I kid you not. It was stuck at an abysmal 4MB/s transfer rate. Here’s how to unblock it. First, follow all the advice on general raid speedups – assuming md2 is your RAID device and you need to replace sd[DEVICE] below with the correct block devices that constitute the array: This is all common advice that it is easy to find.
