I was thinking idly today -- and probably in a wildly unoriginal way -- about some of the disputes about subscriptions to software and the politics of this model.

A friend chucked me an old Crumar Bit99 synthesizer from the 1980s. It's a beast! Lovely bass sounds. Totally unusable interface. See figure A. However, when I received it, the unit was in a bad state. Terrible fuzzy white noise sound along with every note. It sounded as though it was totally wrecked. It's actually, though, very easy to restore.

Non-vulnerable people perhaps don't understand why the government advice to shielders is so frightening. I think I can give a flavour though: 1. Shielding is to be eased on the 1st April. Nobody in the "extremely clinically vulnerable" group -- whom the virus would likely kill -- will have had their second jab by this point. Infection levels are still around 5,000-6,000 new cases per day, nationwide. This is not low.

I have to admit, today, that I was wrong about the risk of others reprinting open-access monographs produced under a Creative Commons license. An outfit called "Saint Philip Street Press" has reprinted (on demand) the entire catalogues of Open Book Publishers, Ubiquity Press, UCL Press, and others.

I have, this afternoon (on a day off -- I know, I know) been playing around with the _LRB_ archive, looking for fun patterns in the chain of "who reviews whom". Some preliminary thoughts... If, in careerist terms, essay writing is a network that is about social mobility, concerned with how authors affiliate themselves with one another, then we can possibly understand a little how the industry works – and how writers’ careers benefit – by

The Publisher's Association has [commissioned a report](https://www.publishers.org.uk/publications/economic-impact-assessment/) that seems to be their latest attempt at painting open access to research as economically damaging to the publishing sector.

Today I have written to the University of Leicester [tendering my resignation as an external examiner](/images/Resignation.pdf). The text of resignation is below: Dear Professor Canagarajah, I write, following my previous correspondence of the 22nd January, to tender my resignation as an external examiner in the department of English at the University of Leicester.

This morning I had to have a call with our accountants that I was somewhat dreading: does Brexit have tax implications for the Open Library of Humanities, a company limited by guarantee with charitable objects (a UK charity)? An important point about our model: [OLH is not a supply](/2015/04/24/gearing-up-for-olh-in-the-uk-and-the-resolution-to-the-vat-question/). Because, in our model, we do not charge anybody for a direct service provision,

This week opened with the distressing news that Lord Sumption, supposedly someone whose judgement is entirely sound, having been a Supreme Court justice, had told a cancer sufferer live on air that [her life was less valuable than others](https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/jan/17/jonathan-sumption-cancer-patient-life-less-valuable-others). Pretty disgusting stuff that, to me, seems to show a type of thinking that is similar to eugenics;

I am due up for vaccination in the very near future. This is good news. But it's tempered.

A discourse of 'fairness' has emerged in open-access circles in recent years. It has come from a sense that big, for-profit publishers have not played 'fairly' with libraries over the past 30 years. It is unsurprising. These large publishers make margins of 35%+ on billions of dollars of revenue, even while library budgets stagnate.