For an open-access advocate, it's easy to pick on Elsevier. An enormous and immensely profitable publisher, it has been, in my personal view, obstructive towards the implementation of open access. Again, in my opinion, this seems to be because it fears for its revenue stream, rather than because it cares about science. The ElsevierValentines hashtag was puerile, but fun, and demonstrated this sentiment. But these are just my opinions.
The most well-known, although neither the most common nor the only, way of providing gold open access to research material is through article or book processing charges (APCs/BPCs). These are problematic in some disciplines where most research work is unfunded (hint: the social sciences and the humanities). It also tends to concentrate costs/risk. To clarify: it is not, in these instances, about paying to bypass quality control.
In a hybrid open-access environment, “double dipping” refers to cases where a publisher sells their services to an author (author-pays open access) while simultaneously selling the end product to libraries (a subscription). Typically, in the journal world, this happens when an open-access article appears in a subscription journal (for which the author pays) but the publisher does not lower the cost of subscriptions to the journal.
The environment surrounding open access to monographs was significantly advanced today by the release of a report commissioned by the UK's Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), a quango (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation) that translates the government's higher education budget allocation into usable funds.
That's a pretty specific title, I suspect, but as I am learning with the Open Library of Humanities, we're in uncharted territory, a place where the specifics matter.
This event will debate how and in what ways the web has complicated, enhanced, and changed the rights of citizens for better or for worse. The ongoing fallout from the Snowden revelations has both sharpened awareness of how our rights are changing and highlighted a culture of indifference towards once cherished rights and freedoms.
Some notes and early (very abstract) draft thoughts on whether Foucauldian genealogies, as redefined by Colin Koopman, can help us to address the problems of the archive in contemporary fiction studies. In Pynchon and Philosophy , I needed to give a succinct outline of the usual approach towards Foucault's broad body of history/philosophy.
At the end of 2013 and 2014 I wrote blog posts on Occam’s Corner (over at the Guardian) to list and briefly review the books I read in each of those years. I am trying to develop this practice into a good habit because it spurs me to read; and I hope it might also serve to flag up titles of interest to others.
Tomorrow I will be speaking at the HEFCE Metrics and the assessment of research quality and impact in the Arts and Humanities workshop, commissioned by the independent review panel. Here are some notes on what I am planning to say. These are just brief notes for a ten-minute talk. They're not particularly nuanced but I thought they were worth sharing.
In a recent essay, Richard M. Stallman, pioneer of the free software movement, asked “what does it mean for a computer to be loyal?” The "tentative definition" that Stallman outlines consists of: Neutrality towards software; Neutrality towards protocols; Neutrality towards implementations; Neutrality towards data communicated; Debugability; Documentation; and Completeness.
2014 was a good year for me. I spent my time mostly working on scholarly communications projects, including the meTypeset software for the Public Knowledge Project and then establishing the Open Library of Humanities with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
