One of the most pleasing, but also most difficult, parts of running the Open Library of Humanities is bringing new journals onto the platform. This is pleasing because these are often subscription publications or society journals that will benefit from open access with no author fees. It’s also really great when we can develop university press partnerships to expand our model. It’s difficult because we have to be ultra-selective.

The saga continues from where I left off. Since then, I emailed a publisher to request a corpus of a specific author’s work in a format that would allow computational techniques (i.e. not Amazon Kindle, which has DRM protection that it is illegal to break). Sadly, the publisher refused on the grounds of complexity, so I am no closer to being able to exercise my legitimate right to a fair-use exemption for the purpose of research here.

It is a common step in the ongoing reform of research practices to criticize the set of proxy measures that we use to evaluate research. I’ve certainly done this. The argument for DORA – the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment – is that one should judge the research work, not judge where it was published. Parts of DORA read: and Worthy sentiments indeed.

I run a small academic publisher, the Open Library of Humanities. Well, I say small but, at 18 journals, we are bigger than quite a few small university presses. But, by most accounts, we are small. I want to write here about how much this costs, so that those starting new presses can think about it. The figures here are ballpark, not precise. Let us make some assumptions: Running/coordinating/funding 18 journals requires work.

One of the things that we have to do in meTypeset is to capture parenthetical citations. These range in styles, but the following are good examples: Some text (Martin Eve, p. 45) Eve notes (345). Eve notes (p. 345) A great thing (Alex, P. 45) Here is one of them: (Silva, Rodrigues, Oliveira, &

There is an article, published in a “top” journal in my field, that makes a series of claims with which I substantially disagree. In fact, I think the piece, which will probably go on to be widely cited and used, is flawed.

I have previously written, having had conversations with Erik Ketzan (although any misunderstandings in the final things I’m writing here are mine, not his), about a problem with the synthesis between the UK copyright exemption for research and EU Directive 2001/29/EC. The problem is that while UK law allows for exemptions on the grounds of research, EU law does not allow for the breaking of DRM that might facilitate this.

Here are my draft responses to the parts of the Consultation on the Second Research Excellence Framework that attracted my interested. These are my individual thoughts, not those of any institution that I represent. They are also not my final submission.

From January this year, I am a member of the Universities UK Open Access Monographs Working Group. The aims of the group, in preparation for the mandate for the anticipated Third Research Excellence Framework in the mid-2020s, are to monitor progress towards the practical implementation of open access monographs; to promote and accelerate cultural change towards OA publishing within academia and among traditional publishers;

As I’ve written before, Learned Societies are one of the biggest barriers to open access. They derive revenue from publishing that they then use to pay for disciplinary goods (scholarships, prizes, public engagement etc.) Fear of new economic models for scholarly communications sometimes, although not always, drives them away from open access. I have never thought this was a good way to pay for these aspects of our academic practice.