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.

One of the major challenges that we face in the Jisc Open Monographs Metrics Experiment is in aligning the linguistic expression of a citation with its underlying canonical citation object.

An interesting discussion today with one of my senior publishing technology developers, Mauro Sanchez, led me to thinking about the rights of presentation and author rights to object to derogatory treatment of work published in scholarly journals. Namely: in the digital age, if one has a publication in a journal, what rights do the publishers have to change that platform and the underlying objects of publication?

The British Academy has responded to the revised Plan S consultation. It’s nice of them to grudgingly accept there have been some improvements but I remain dismayed by the continued misrepresentation of Plan S within their documents. I will here quote some of the elements of their response that I believe misread or misrepresent Plan S. This post is strictly my personal opinion based on my academic expertise. QR, awarded by REF, is a grant.

Stare him in the eyes when you think he’s folding You play your luck with the cards you’re holding You throw a double six with the dice you’re rolling You gotta test your luck to break the moulding Rummy and Patience and Texas hold ’em Blackjack and Poker and Solitaire loading Crossing all your fingers, here’s to hoping Scattering chips that’s the way you’re rolling Cashing and acting and full-house holding Begging and stealing and cheating

This is an author’s accepted manuscript of an article accepted for publication in LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory . It is made available, here, on a personal website with no embargo and will also be available in Birkbeck’s institutional repository 18 months after publication, as per Taylor & Francis’s OA policy at the time of acceptance. Data appendices will be openly available at or around the time of publication.

In the acknowledgements to Close Reading with Computers , I write: This morning, I have sent a copy of the book to Andrew, having managed to track him down, along with a side-by-side picture of our two books – separated as they are by 26 years – Mars and Back published 1993 and Close Reading with Computers in 2019. I hope it makes him smile when it arrives.