The new Conservative government in the United Kingdom has promised to scrap the Human Rights Act. The [rationale that they give for this](https://www.conservatives.com/~/media/files/downloadable%20Files/human_rights.pdf) centres around originalism (claiming that the HRA has been interpreted beyond its original scope) and national self-determination (the EU telling the UK government what laws it can pass). I remain worried about this.

Academic publishers come in all shapes and sizes. Some are commercial, some are mission-driven, some are not-for-profit. This creates an interesting dynamic for a market. Not-for-profit publishers see themselves as partners of the academy, working alongside their academic colleagues to disseminate material. Indeed, some university presses are departments of universities.

I am very pleased to announce that, as of today (1 ^st of May, 2015), I am now a Senior Lecturer in Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. I have greatly enjoyed my time at Lincoln and fully intend to stay in touch with the colleagues and friends that I have made there, whom I will sorely miss. That said, I am, of course, looking forward to the future.

A while ago, I wrote of the tricky situation potentially faced by UK OA publishers operating on a cost-pool basis/consortial basis. After our accountants gave a report on this about a month or so ago, I sought confirmation from HMRC that it was, indeed, the case that these models do not count as a direct supply of a service.

I tell people, repeatedly, that publisher brand fuels a strange economic environment for scholarly communications. I also note that symbolic capital (reputation) has a direct conversion to material capital (money). Finally, I point out that the economics of books are harder than journals for new OA publishers for reasons of scale in both material and symbolic economics.

There is no single cause of the problems with the economics of scholarly communications. The expectation that we can publish more and more research on the same, or lesser, budgets is one factor. The rise of profiteering commercial publishers is another. There is also a group of smaller other aspects, though, one of which I will discuss here.

"It is never a good time to start a new journal. Even so, 1987 seems unpropitious to a remarkable degree. The academic world in general feels itself to be under attack. The Humanities in particular feel marginalized and underfunded. Outwardly querulous, inwardly riven, they sense themselves to be hopelessly at odds with a culture which has long abandoned any recognition of the value of their role.

The most common way in which we can re-conceive of the economics of gold open access is to think of the publisher as providing a service to the author. After all, in an academic environment (where open access is most likely to flourish) authors are not usually writing their books to receive huge financial returns; they are, instead, paid through their salaried position.

The current transition to gold open access (OA) through the implementation of an author- or institution-facing charge (an article or book processing charge: APC or BPC) is based upon two key flawed assumptions that are particularly acute in the humanities disciplines. The first of these assumptions is that a market will emerge in which rational actors (researchers) will develop price sensitivity in the selection of their publication venue.

The current transition to gold open access (OA) through the implementation of an author- or institution-facing charge (an article or book processing charge: APC or BPC) is based upon two key flawed assumptions that are particularly acute in the humanities disciplines.

I am reading a most remarkable book. I tend to read in sets of three: a novel, a work of lit crit/philosophy/history, then something about technology. This latter category includes library information science stuff, history of technology stuff and sometimes programming manuals. David West's *Object Thinking*, published by Microsoft, is ostensibly in this last group but like nothing else.