One of the oft-repeated adages in the scholarly communications world is that ‘the money is in the system’, it's just badly distributed. This is one of [the core problems with APCs](https://eve.gd/2017/04/03/100-people-in-a-room/); they don't distribute funds in a similar way to subscriptions, so even if we could afford it, we still have a problematic distribution. What if this isn't true, though, that the level of funding will remain the same?

Today, I read Andrew Elfenbein’s _The Gist of Reading_ (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018). By any account, this is a provocative and stimulating read that brings observations from cognitive psychology to bear on literary critical concerns. Predominantly concerned with nineteenth-century novels in his examples, Elfenbein nonetheless draws out a broad theoretical framework that I believe has far wider consequences.

A famous line from Jurassic Park (1993) is that ‘[y]our scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should’. I felt much the same, today, reading J. M. Hawker’s Capital Letters: The Economics of Academic Bookselling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) <https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675376>. For the aptly named Hawker tells us, the ‘core purpose of both

A famous line from _Jurassic Park_ (1993) is that ‘[y]our scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should’. I felt much the same, today, reading J. M. Hawker’s _Capital Letters: The Economics of Academic Bookselling_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) <[https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675376](https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675376)>. For the aptly named Hawker tells us, the

Museums continue to make life miserable for academic scholars who wish to re-use their images in third-party publications. I am not against paying museums license fees for images they have digitized, although I believe that Simon Tanner has shown that the overheads of running a licensing department can outweight the actual revenue, against footfall/exposure etc.

I have just finished editing a book collection in which Robin de Mourat, Donato Ricci, and Bruno Latour ask: how does a format make a public?

I have just finished editing a book collection in which Robin de Mourat, Donato Ricci, and Bruno Latour ask: how does a format make a public?

This week for our [COPIM project](https://www.copim.ac.uk/) reading group we are turning to the forthcoming Stuart Lawson, ‘The Political Histories of UK Public Libraries and Access to Knowledge’, in _Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access_, ed. by Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020), pp. 161–72. This work is not yet published but will be openly

As part of the [COPIM project](https://www.copim.ac.uk/), my work packages are conducting some background reading groups.

As part of the COPIM project, my work packages are conducting some background reading groups. This week we are reading Susan Leigh Star, ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure’, American Behavioral Scientist , 43.3 (1999), 377–91 <https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326>. I had read this a long time ago but enjoyed revisiting it. I thought, in a spirit of openness, that I would share my notes on this article.

This bank holiday, I wanted to spend some time playing around with Zotero's automatic ingest of open access books. There are some problems with this. For recap, Zotero offers users a way easily to ingest items using built-in metadata on a page. It supports Dublin Core, various RDF implementations, and COinS. Here's the problem, though: if you want automatic lookup by ISBN, you have to use the COinS translator/provide COinS metadata.