tl;dr: cancel your big deals and transitional agreements (they’re not working) and invest in a set of hundreds of non-APC, OA titles offered by Open Journals Collective, which derives from the OLH model. Email Caroline Edwards (at Birkbeck or at OJC) to get involved.

This week, I took some time out to read Elly Griffith’s most recent book, The Frozen People. I thought this sounded quite an interesting genre-fusing novel, welding together detective fiction and SF/time travel. Sure, it’s hardly the first to do so, but it sounded worth a read. I’d met the author a few years’ back through a mutual connection: Lesley Thompson, another British crime writer.

Yesterday, academic social media went into overdrive as many intellectuals discovered LibGen (“Library Genesis”) for the first time, thanks to an article and tool in The Atlantic.

I am making a concerted effort to make grant applications that I have written openly available. We are far too secretive about these, because we don’t like to expose the cases where we “failed” (didn’t get the grant). I am no different to anyone else in this respect - it’s not gratifying to have to unveil that you applied for 50,000 grants and only got 1 of them. But it’s more realistic. So I’ll try to put up some “failures”, too.

My days working at Knowledge Commons are highly varied. It’s great.

Open source projects like InvenioRDM – on which we rely for our repository software at Knowledge Commons – thrive on community contributions. When initiatives like ours not only use these platforms but actively contribute improvements back to the original codebase, everyone benefits. This “upstreaming” process takes work, but it represents the collaborative spirit that makes open source software so powerful.

As part of my work on Knowledge Commons, I want to make more of our development process open, welcoming, and transparent, by using blogging. So I will be writing some technical posts on what I’m doing there and how I’ve overcome various technical challenges. In this post, I want to set out how I got BuddyPress notifications into a separate application (our new “Profiles” app). First: why am I doing this?

Very few people like thinking about the fact they will die. But it can prove a substantial administrative headache to loved ones if they don’t know about all of your finances, your passwords, your emails etc. At the same time, you shouldn’t be writing down passwords in any document that could be stolen or seen; it’s bad cybersecurity practice.

I had a problem with my Tor relay last night. For some reason, the application (daemon) started but then after about 5 seconds it stopped listening. The Tor Metrics site was displaying a red button saying my node was unreachable and when I did “sudo ss -ltp” I got nothing. The application literally wasn’t “listening” (in network socket terms). The answer was actually embarrassingly simple.

Among the works of fiction in the feminist canon, few are as celebrated as Charlotte Perkins-Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”. This short story, or novella, depending on how you want to define those categories, details the abuse suffered by a woman in the supposed name of mental health, at the whim of her male “carers”. The story is now, as Catherine J. Golden notes, “among the most studied texts in the English-speaking world”. In this piece I

This text is derived from a lecture I gave to first-year undergraduates about a decade ago. It was languishing on my computer and I thought it better to put it out there for general educational benefit, in case it helps anyone starting out with her poetry.