This week for [COPIM](https://www.copim.ac.uk/) we are reading Bardzell, Shaowen, Jeffrey Bardzell, Jodi Forlizzi, John Zimmerman, and John Antanitis, ‘Critical Design and Critical Theory: The Challenge of Designing for Provocation’, in Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference, DIS ’12 (Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom: Association for Computing Machinery, 2012), pp. 288–297

Transformative agreements for OA are all the rage at the moment. Plan S compliance beckons and early movers can make it sound as though they are really doing what’s needed. Yet we’re at a very difficult time with the global pandemic of COVID-19. Library budgets are likely to contract as institutions come under financial strain.

This week, our COPIM WP2/WP3 reading group discussed Meunier, Benjamin, and Olaf Eigenbrodt, ‘More Than Bricks and Mortar: Building a Community of Users Through Library Design’, _Journal of Library Administration_, 54.3 (2014), 217–32 <[https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2014.915166](https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2014.915166)>. We were interested to consider the implications of participatory design in library architecture for new digital

One of the oft-repeated adages in the scholarly communications world is that ‘the money is in the system’, it's just badly distributed. This is one of [the core problems with APCs](https://eve.gd/2017/04/03/100-people-in-a-room/); they don't distribute funds in a similar way to subscriptions, so even if we could afford it, we still have a problematic distribution. What if this isn't true, though, that the level of funding will remain the same?

One of the oft-repeated adages in the scholarly communications world is that ‘the money is in the system’, it’s just badly distributed. This is one of the core problems with APCs; they don’t distribute funds in a similar way to subscriptions, so even if we could afford it, we still have a problematic distribution. What if this isn’t true, though, that the level of funding will remain the same?

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](https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675376)>. For the aptly named Hawker tells us, the

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?

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?