The most recent [Royal Historical Society document on Plan S](https://royalhistsoc.org/policy/publication-open-access/plan-s-and-history-journals/) says the following about the Open Library of Humanities (OLH): "It fails, however, to reference or explore the funding base that has made these important initiatives both possible and (to date) sustainable.

Last week, while [I was having blood products transfused at the Royal Free Hospital](https://eve.gd/2019/10/04/immunity-problems/), I received an email from the Leverhulme Trust stating that I had been awarded the [2019 Philip Leverhulme Trust Prize in Literary Studies](https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/philip-leverhulme-prizes-2019). The works that were submitted for close scrutiny for this were four of my books Close Reading with Computers ,

From around 2010 to 2013 I was on a drug called Rituximab to control my autoimmune conditions (rheumatoid arthritis and vasculitis). This highly effective medication targets b-cells and destroys autoimmune responses by disabling parts of the immune system. After a few years of treatment, though, my immunoglobulin levels were extremely low and it was decided that Rituximab was no longer safe for me. I was moved to tocilizumab.

A Learned Society spoke to me last week about what they could do to move to an open-access model. They currently receive about 100,000 EUR per year from their subscription/hybrid-OA publisher but were willing to jettison this (!) if they could go OA with no author fees. The problem was that implementing a new business model was a total pain.

After last week's post on APCs, some further musings. Following Kathleen Fitzpatrick's [work on generous thinking](https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/generous-thinking) and the importance of community for the academy, I was [advocating for the importance of the mission-driven nature of the publishers](/2019/09/19/the-problems-of-unit-costs-per-article/) that we choose infrastructurally to support.

Every five minutes or so, someone tries to come up with a cost-per-article figure for academic publishing. In the past, I've tried to do it too. But more and more I find myself wanting to resist the temptation. Not only because the data collection takes forever, but because the figures that I would produce, from my organisation, would likely not be cross-applicable to another organisation.

There's [an article](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/new-deals-could-help-scientific-societies-survive-open-access) out in The Times Higher Education Science Magazine (edit 11:38am) about Learned Societies and open access. As usual, it points out the thorny problem that Learned Societies derive revenue from subscriptions that they fear will be lost under an OA model. A few points spring to mind on this.

Here's an interesting one for me. The article processing charge (APC) model for open access is [attracting a lot of flack](https://items.ssrc.org/parameters/the-library-solution-how-academic-libraries-could-end-the-apc-scourge/). It's being called the "scourge" of the scholarly communications world and is criticized for perpetuating global epistemic inequality. I think this is right in many ways.

Sci-Hub is a copyright-violating site that provides infringing access to scholarly publications that are behind paywalls. Its ethics are problematic but it's also proving very difficult to stop.

One of the major challenges that we face in the Jisc Open Monographs Metrics Experiment is in aligning the linguistic expression of a citation with its underlying canonical citation object.

The [British Academy has responded](https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/A_commentary_by_the_British_Academy_on_final_Plan_S-July_2019.pdf) to the revised Plan S consultation. It's nice of them to grudgingly accept there have been some improvements but I remain dismayed by the continued misrepresentation of Plan S within their documents.