As detailed over on the OLH site, I am very pleased to be able to say that we have secured a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to launch the Open Library of Humanities! To quote: Funding for the Open Library of Humanities from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on April 07, 2014.

The Cluster and the University Library invited Dr. Martin Eve (Lincoln University) for a two day intensive workshop with Dulip Withanage and Dr. Andrea Hacker to develop and design a publication tool for Open Access books.

Since yesterday's HEFCE announcement, I've seen some comments floating around that resurrect the argument that OA mandates are a blow to academic freedom. I do not agree, and especially so when we're talking about the HEFCE mandate. With HEFCE's current policy, 96% of submissions to the last REF would have simply required authors to deposit to comply; no change of publisher policy was necessary.

The Really Short Version: Submit journal article. Check journal policy at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ (the bits on “post-print” are the thing to pay attention to). On acceptance go to your institution's repository and create a record. Upload your author's accepted version setting the embargo as per SHERPA/RoMEO.

As you may, or may not, know, I am working on an open source tool for scholarly article typesetting. Whether you care about this or not (it's quite geeky in some ways, but I think important), if you speak a language other than English, then I need your help. One of the things this software has to do is to try to work out where in a document we might find a list of works cited by either a scientist or a scholar.

From the Prezi terms of use: Section 6.2: Section 9: It is extremely ambiguous of Prezi to state that it both “obtains no rights to your content other than as provided for herein” while simultaneously claiming that the “content […] is owned, controlled, or licensed by or to Prezi”. Does an arrangement of items constitute “user content”? What if you make a unique creation (your “user content”) using Prezi's artwork?

Debugging a text-based transcoder meTypeset is, in essence, a transcoder for text.

Diversity of material One of the big challenges that we face in designing an open source scholarly typesetter is ensuring that a diverse range of papers can accurately be parsed by the system. I come from a humanities background and know what articles from those disciplines look like. I do not necessarily know the structure and format of an article from the biomedical sciences.

The Critics of OA and Acknowledging “Predation” Several of the critics of OA, most notably in recent days Jeffrey Beall and John Bohannon – the former of whom believes, with an almost McCarthyite tone, that Open Access is an anti-corporatist movement – have pointed out the practices of so-called “predatory” gold open access publishers. They have a point.

Modularizing the Project Today brings with it some notable changes to my scholarly article XML (NLM/JATS) typesetter (meTypeset). First off, the project is now nicely handling user supplied captions to figures, so long as they are in the format “Figure 1: a figure caption”. The second, more important change, that I've implemented, however, is to begin to modularize the project and to add individual command line hooks for different functions.