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October 2019

I bought loads of chocolates to fend off hordes of trick-or-treaters but none have turned up and now I will just have to stuff my face with chocolates

The COPIM project starts officially this Friday. Exciting times. There will be jobs!

"because I just didn't have enough to do already"

The final grant report for the Open Library of Humanities has now been filed. As of the last few months we've been funded entirely by our LPS model, not grants. Our continued existence is due to our library members. We've shown it can work. We now need others to adopt this model.

We are extremely grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their generous support over the past few years. I've learned a lot about the fallacy of "build it and they will come", but we built it, then did a lot of promo/marketing work, and then they _did_ come.

I should note that *just this week* we have had, I think, 3 new library signups. The more libraries that support us, the more we can do to ensure our future ongoing viability.

The greatest threat to our model is not one that we can easily contain: the global economic situation continues to remain turbulent and building young, resilient organisations that depend on funding streams – from academic libraries – that are subject to fluctuation is hard.

As lots of you know, despite making music, my hearing is really bad and variable due to a stroke and toxic antibiotics combined. I need all the help I can get. And I just lots of help from a friend with acoustically treating the music studio! I mean, the office... Sounds great!

Read McEwan's _First Love, Last Rites_ this morning. A collection of thoroughly unpleasant stories, as though a commissioning editor asked for Dahl, without any of the redeeming humour.

Michelle has Views on it.

Further thoughts after working with the @remarkablepaper for a fortnight. I LOVE the device. Really great to use. I do wish there was Dropbox integration though and I could just dump PDFs in a folder. My workflow is Dropbox <-> Phone <-> Remarkable which isn't totally smooth.

I have just pressed "send" on the final version of the book that I am editing with @jwyg: Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access. I hope it will fly out into the world in 2020. OA of course.

The final ToC for Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access is now in place! Off to press soon and out next year in print and open-access forms. #OAWeek #OAWeek19 #OAWeek2019

just one author contract left and we are good to submit!

I have just typed the final words of the first draft of our Reading Peer Review book.

'Feedback is welcome. Except from you, reviewer two.'

Time for a whisky.

Today's work on the Reading Peer Review book is in the dangerous land of LDA topic modelling.

Cue: many paragraphs on how dodgy it is to interpret these things etc. etc.

A report from Royal Historical Society on Plan S out this morning uses Pynchon’s ‘If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers’ as an epigraph.

But this is a "Proverb for Paranoids" in GR.

Paranoids who see conspiracies everywhere?

I haven't had a chance to read it yet. I suspect there are some good points in the report. I suspect I'll also disagree with at least some of it. https://royalhistsoc.org/policy/publication-open-access/plan-s-and-history-journals/

this tweet probably addresses the wrong question ;)

Today is the fun of intravenous immunoglobulin replacement therapy. I'll stop tweeting about these visits once the novelty has worn off...

I have terrible posture -- at least in part due to a decade and a half of rheumatoid arthritis and chronic pain -- but I really like Slouch Stoppah. Except that if I really get into the groove on my soundtrack with chair dancing it thinks I am slouching :/ https://slouchstoppah.com/

After the successes of the past fortnight, I jokingly noted to my wife this Monday morning at 7am that I had not yet received a prize from a major foundation this week. At which point she produced this 😂

'She did show favour to the youth in your sight only to exasperate you, to awake your dormouse valour, to put fire in your heart and brimstone in your liver.'

synthesizers not part of the prize

This morning I'm working on our Reading Peer Review book, which is almost at the full draft stage. Today studying the way that peer reviewers correct language and the formal mimetic qualities of linguistic expression to reflect 'good'/'bad' science and the 'care' the author takes

Coming very soon to the New Horizons in Contemporary Writing Series: Joe Brooker's Jonathan Lethem and the Galaxy of Writing. Excited to see this in print!

Ah yes, insomnia. Brilliant. And then wake up to find our prime minister is once again behaving like a spoilt brat of a child. What a start to the day.

The book... Is done! Just now need all the contributor contracts... Celebrating with a bowl of stewed apple prepared by my 98-year-old grandmother. Close of a good day.

Hmm. Also. Couldn't normally contemplate this so soon after the cyclo.

Was thinking about the weirdness of edited collections and conversations with @pj_webster. As editor, my name will appear in each citation, but I don't necessarily agree 100% with every statement made by every author in this book. That plurality is good.

@pj_webster But process of review means authors have often also changed their work based on my feedback, external reviewer feedback, shape of the volume etc. It's a very weird intra-referential process.

@pj_webster In some ways it's not different to a journal and editing that; I don't just accept things that I totally agree with, but those that display coherent logic and attempt to address objections as part of ongoing scholarly dialectical processes.

@pj_webster Somehow the bookishness of the edited book and the authorship conventions of editors' names afront yields a different feel, though

@pj_webster Chapters are also invited/commissioned often, so there is some expectation that the editors approve. But, like Forrest's life/box of chocolates, you still never quite know what you are going to get.

The thing I like most about Ebay is buyers who aggressively threaten to visit your house after tracking down where you work.

Still waiting for the item to be delivered back while dpd helpfully and incorrectly told the psycho buyer that they had already delivered it. Gave a refund to this idiot before I've actually had it back.

Still have not received the item back

I am pleased that we have managed to include a Yogi Berra malapropism in the book's introduction. When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

Further thoughts on the reMarkable: the handwriting recognition is spectacularly good, even with my unbelievably bad handwriting.

Wahey! Seem to have recovered from the dire drugs with miraculous speed. And a package from my ace record label arrived with olive green Tici Taci t-shirt!

Other news: 142,685 words of edited collection are today getting the final sign-off for submission to The MIT Press.

It's a terrible episode but the Wikipedia synopsis of the STAR TREK: VOYAGER episode, 'Threshold', makes up for it: 'Tom Paris breaks the transwarp barrier in the Shuttlecraft Cochrane, designed to reach warp 10, but de-evolves into a salamander.'

Ah, there's a "new Facebook experience" being rolled out. I am sure this will go 100% smoothly and everyone will be happy with it.

I've just seen it and can safely say that everyone is going to hate it.

I'm really worried there is some kind of persistent XSS attack on my Facebook feed. Every time I load the homepage, the search bar is populated with the word "handkerchief". I have tried disabling all extensions and apps to no avail.

There is a sign in this hospital that writes of "improving the patient experience of the final hours of life". Although well meaning, the language here feels too much like "customer experience". Sounds as though there will be a follow-up "how was your death?" questionnaire.

I mean, I'd like the experience to be as positive as possible, but given that it is literally unbearable...

You know what's annoying? Having to discard metadata such as precise publication date in favour just of "year" in order to have standardised style throughout a bibliography.

I am very happy to be awarded a prize per week for the next year if someone could arrange that. An acceptable rate. Thx.

A winning alphabetical biography run in this edited book that is SO. ALMOST. DONE.:

@EileenAJoy
Bruno Latour
@lawsonstu

Booker Prize "breaking the rules" definitely one of those "scandals" charted by James F. English that will only serve to increase the prize's long-term prestige.

Today I am giving a talk at Jisc, but apologies, I'll still be glowing about the prize news all day... Normal service back tomorrow when I'll shut up about it 😂

This morning I read Jim Crace's _Being Dead_. He's a very good writer though I think _Quarantine_ remains my favourite.

I have exciting news for Monday that I'm looking forward to sharing but in the meantime I'm preparing for a rare foray this year outside of the immunosuppression bubble to present our work on book intersections for Jisc.

Had a dream on loop where everyone was obsessed with rocket space-flight travel to other worlds and an entrepreneurial type ex-astronaut was talking it all up. I tried to bring up the carbon emissions point but nobody would listen.

Today's current editing task is removing instance of abbreviation and acronymisation (IoAA) where the abbreviation is never used again.

In the context of a glossary of terms about OA, this is fun:

CERN: the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire). Operates the Zenodo repository and the Large Hadron Collider.

Comparable infrastructures.

It is frustrating that @PalgraveLit @Palgrave_ policies mean that you can't retrospectively make a book open access, even if you come into subsequent funding opportunities. ("It is not possible for authors to convert books to open access retrospectively") https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-research/policies/book-policies

@PalgraveLit @Palgrave_ Though it seems they have a green OA policy that allows deposit of the entire AAM? https://www.palgrave.com/gp/rights-permissions/our-policy-on-archiving-in-institutional-or-funding-body-reposit/6629030

If I wanted to move away from paper/printing and onto a tablet for reading and annotating PDFs, what would people recommend?

It's important to include entities in any glossary that may not foreseeably exist in the future and that might therefore confuse readers.

OfS: the Office for Students. A regulatory body for higher education in the United Kingdom spun out of HEFCE.

One of those mornings where I am gnashing my teeth at almost every new email that has come in. This means I should not do emails until less grumpy.

think I'll work on editing people's book chapters instead and they can bear the brunt of my wrath

Disadvantages of being pumped full of corticosteroids: insomnia, waking up at 3.30am. Advantages: not dying by reacting badly to the blood products; an extra 3 hours of research time.

Just overheard someone on the train noting that they had a six-hour meeting scheduled today at work and suddenly the whole day on a blood transfusion doesn't sound so bad.

Thanks, all, for your kind wishes. It was very shocking last week to get this news. I will find a way to work with it, though, and will get on with it. Lots of people have it worse than I do and I am so grateful for our healthcare system that keeps me alive.

Thanks for the kind words all. Off my mopey mood and onto the exercise bike this morning.

"Though it is not often that death is so clearly told to fuck off." - Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Today's hospital appointment was helpful. But it was also traumatising. I have just been told that I need a quite difficult to administer procedure, regularly, for the rest of my life. As usual, I'll share more later in the hope it might help someone else and as catharsis.

Today's fun for me: immunology. Working out what to do about my incredibly low immunoglobulin levels, wiped out by years of immunosuppression (and in particular, Rituximab), but not repleting.

Today's #OAmonographs19 was clarifying for me. In being granted the privilege to articulate live the culmination of several years of thought on scholarly communications, I think I have come to a new idea of infrastructural funding for academic publishers.

This all sounds terribly vague when trying to distill to a tweet, but something clicked today with me as an idea in a way that only happens, in my experience, every few years. I know what I now think and just need to make time to express this in longer-form writing.

It's about the types of entity and the publishing "service" they provide as being more thoroughly lock-stepped as _intellectual_ activities that need co-funding as part of research, engaged far earlier in the research lifecycle.

It's in tune with library-publishing initiatives and the ideas, although often unrealised visions, of university presses. It needs far more than I can provide here, but I wanted to write something, publicly, about how much today has galvanized my thought for the next steps.

OK, that's hilarious. @Helen_snaith, who is basically in charge of the UK's OA policy for monographs at Research England/REF, was told by a publisher, upon inquiring re. deposit of her book chapter, that she "didn't have to do this because REF didn't mandate it" #OAmonographs19

We're in a round-up panel here with @stevenhill, @rupertgatti, @Helen_snaith, and @kain_sas at #OAmonographs19. From Rupert: consensus in this room at St Catharine's College, Cambridge that OA is a good goal for books, but that BPCs will not achieve it. So we need new routes.

I know there are huge barriers to overcome, but #oamonographs19 has left me feeling optimistic. Seems a sea-change in accepting that OA for books is a good goal and beneficial for the humanities. From publishers, academics, and librarians. Still have massive hurdles to leap.

An interesting point re. SciHub/piracy of academic papers: if it's easier for people to pirate the work, publishers lose the metrics/hits, which can make it hard to justify library investment.

(We get loads of usage requests like this at OLH...)

Everyone says there are too many monographs being published, but it's never _their_ books that are in the "too many" camp ;) #oamonographs19

Prof Margot Finn of the @RoyalHistSoc: if we could get over the practical considerations (sustainability, staffing, costs), open access for books is a no-brainer.

My question for Dr Nicola Kozicharow at #OAmonographs19 is: are these problems of image rights about open access or about digital books more broadly?

Need to correct one figure having spoken with @rupertgatti - @OpenBookPublish put their unit cost per book at around the £5k-£6.5k mark, not the figure I cited from the Pinter article. #OAmonographs19

V short version of my talk this morning for those not there:

1 OA monograph economics are hard
2 we need to solve this problem or we have a world where all science is available for free to anyone but you have to pay to read hums research
3 COPIM working on this; need involvement

Looking forward to tomorrow's event at Cambridge. One of my favourite lines in the programme is the list of publisher stands... "Attending: Cambridge University Press, Radical Open Access, ScholarLed Publishers, Springer Nature, UCL Press".

You know what would be really useful? @zotero adding a DOI field to book chapter citations. Could be a positive driver to their adoption.