Birkbeck, University of London

Martin Paul Eve

People often think that reading a novel is a very linear activity. You start at the start and proceed through the text. As in most media forms, though, the beginning of any novel is really not truly its beginning. The American author, Thomas Pynchon, the focus of my paper today, is famed, it could be argued, mostly for three things.

‘Begin at the beginning, the King said, very gravely’: Serious Openings and Subversive Epigraphs in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon

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

An Introduction to Charlotte Perkins-Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’

I love my Moog Minitaur synth. It's a great little bass station that packs a punch. However, I have been facing some issues using its full functionality. Namely, there's a software plugin that enables you to tweak all the settings from the DAW. It controls the synth over midi via USB.

Moog Minitaur: the editor and exclusive USB lock

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,

The Open Library of Humanities and Brexit: VAT Position

At this year's _Canadian Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences_ I had the pleasure of attending a talk by David McClure in the digital humanities strand on his visualization tool, _TextPlot_.

Visualizing Gravity's Rainbow

I have read, with some dismay, the draft of [Ithaka S+R’s most recent report](https://sr.ithaka.org/blog/draft-report-for-community-input/). I offer here some critical remarks that I hope will allow for revision of the work, which I believe offers an insular, digital-nationalist, exclusionary vision for the future of scholarly communications. The views herein are my personal take, not those of any organization for which I work.

The latest Ithaka S+R draft report is hugely regressive

# Defining Threat Infrastructures ‘Threat infrastructures’ are platforms that are established or promised to be established solely or primarily in order to change the behavior of incumbent initiatives through fear. In recent years, such platforms have featured heavily in the scholarly communications landscape and have been driven primarily by funders pushing for open access.

The Emergence of Threat Infrastructures: Plan S and Behavioral Change

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?

Is ‘the money in the system’?

So, after three years of shielding, I got Covid. I contracted it at hospital (or on my way there). How do I know? Because I don't go anywhere else. I thought, though, that it might be useful to document my experience of getting antiviral treatments for Covid as an extremely clinically vulnerable individual. I developed a sore throat on Saturday evening (17th December 2022) but tested negative.

How do you get access to antivirals on the NHS CDMU system and does it work?

This week for COPIM we are reading Knöchelmann, Marcel, The Democratisation Myth: Open Access and the Solidification of Epistemic Injustices (SocArXiv, 9 June 2020) . This piece presents an argument that is familiar to me as it strongly mirrors the contents of the forthcoming Mboa Nkoudou, Thomas Hervé, ‘Epistemic Alienation in African Scholarly Communications: Open Access as a Pharmakon’, in _Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories,

Reading ‘The Democratisation Myth’ and thinking through decolonial OA

Quite frankly, the current situation is terrifying. Another approximately 400 deaths today in the UK from the virus and the reproduction number (R) is said to be near to 1 (exponential infection rate). The UK has among the worst mortality rates in the world. But it's being portrayed as the right time to ease the lockdown.

Notes on vulnerability and COVID-19

University of Sussex

I've had two people now come back to me on Twitter saying that Gold Open Access, "by definition", means that the author pays. It does not. Much of the terminology around Open Access was proposed by Peter Suber and here's what he has to say about it (I've bolded the relevant portions):  OA journals ("gold OA"): OA journals conduct peer review. OA journals find it easier than non-OA journals to let authors retain copyright.

Gold Open Access does **NOT** mean: "author pays"

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.

Getting the Gist of Reading

These are my notes on [The UKRI Open Access Review Consultation Document](https://www.ukri.org/files/funding/oa/open-access-review-consultation/). 1. The document informs but is not a policy for the REF-after-REF 2021. 2. This document does not change the REF 2021 policy. 3. For peer-reviewed research articles and conference proceedings with an ISSN the new policy proposed here would apply on and after 1 January 2022.

Key Points from The UKRI Open Access Review Consultation Document

This is really speculative, but today I returned to David McClure's [excellent and fun TextPlot tool](https://github.com/davidmcclure/textplot). A type of topic modelling (but not LDA), McClure explains his [Bray-Curtis dissimilarity mapping in a separate post](http://dclure.org/essays/mental-maps-of-texts/) but essentially what is being measured here is the interconnectedness and proximity of various terms within a network graph.

A hypothesis: kernel function density estimation and graphing may predict literary critical attention

I have been playing around with [Pangolin](https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin), a really nice management system for exposing internal services over HTTPS. However, I found that its internal wireguard networking does not play nicely if you already have another wireguard system, like tailscale, on the box. The solution was actually simple, but has a potential tripwire.

Pangolin, Newt, Gerbil and custom ports

HEFCE, the precursor to Research England, [announced in 2016](http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/HEFCE,2014/Content/Pubs/2016/201636/HEFCE2016_36.pdf) that “we intend to move towards an open-access requirement for monographs in the exercise that follows the next REF (expected in the mid-2020s).” This was published in 2016 as, “[g]iven the length of time required to produce and publish monographs,” HEFCE wished “to give due notice to the sector” by

Where we are with the OA monograph mandate for the Third Research Excellence Framework

Up at Durham, Sam Thomas has just announced the details of the forthcoming International Pynchon Week 2013 Conference to be held at Durham University from 5th-8th August, 2013.

International Pynchon Week 2013 Conference: Website and CFP

It should be an easy task to resize image uploads in Django, but it turns out to be a bit more complicated than one would hope. Here are my findings.

Resizing image uploads in Django

This post is part of an [ongoing series](https://martineve.com/GreenPaper/) where I intend to develop my full _personal_ (_not_ institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to refine this. The Green Paper asks in Question 9: &gt;Do you agree with the proposed approach to incentives for the different types of provider? Please give reasons for your answers.

HE Green Paper: response to question 9

So, it looks, with the easy reach of software such as Open Journal Systems and Annotum, as though anybody can create a journal. This is, to a large extent, true. It comes, however, with a problem. Even assuming that you get the editorial board together, have a great first issue and the journal continues, what happens (to take an extreme case) if the server admin dies (I mean real, physical human death)? What happens to the content?

The problems for small Open Access journals in terms of digital preservation

This post is part of an [ongoing series](https://martineve.com/GreenPaper/) where I intend to develop my full _personal_ (_not_ institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to refine this. The Green Paper asks (as question 2): &gt; "How can information from the TEF be used to better inform student and employer decision making?

HE Green Paper: response to question 2

This post is part of an [ongoing series](https://martineve.com/GreenPaper/) where I intend to develop my full _personal_ (_not_ institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to refine this. The Green Paper asks (as question 4): &gt;Where relevant, should an approved Access Agreement be a pre-requisite for a TEF award? What other mechanism might be used for different types of providers? Yes.

HE Green Paper: response to question 4

The announcement of Plan S -- an ambitious undertaking to mandate open access in Europe by 2020 on most funded research, but also now expanding overseas, potentially to the States and beyond -- has prompted debates about the place of academic freedom in the selection of publication venue and whether OA mandates might infringe on such rights.

Some jottings on academic freedom and Plan S/open access

In the past few days, well [over a year since HEFCE signalled](http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/HEFCE,2014/Content/Pubs/2016/201636/HEFCE2016_36.pdf) its "inten[tion] to move towards an open-access requirement for monographs in the exercise that follows the next REF (expected in the mid-2020s)", humanities academics have been getting themselves stirred up on the basis of a document issued by the [Royal Historical

On the OA "mandate" for books in the Third REF and the worry over trade books

This post is part of an [ongoing series](https://martineve.com/GreenPaper/) where I intend to develop my full _personal_ (_not_ institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to refine this. The Green Paper asks in Question 1: &gt; a) What are your views on the potential equality impacts of the proposals and other plans in this consultation? &gt; b) Are there any equality impacts that we have not considered?

HE Green Paper: response to question 1

The following constitute a preliminary note-taking/synoptical exercise undertaken for my own benefit, but shared in case anybody finds them useful. I should probably highlight that I have not read all of Žižek's work and would in no way consider myself an expert. Slavoj Žižek's appearance last night at LSE was, as usual, a spectacular mix of fiery political polemic fused with the humour and outrageous showmanship for which he is famed.

Some brief thoughts on Slavoj Žižek at LSE

I have been asked, by an EdTech researcher called Jen Rhee, to share this graphic, which comes courtesy of Open-Site under a CC-BY-ND license, in order to solicit further comments. Aside from the pedantic tic that I had when reading "amount of books", the graphic is pretty interesting.

Wikipedia Stats Visualized

I run Google Apps for Domains to handle my email. Recently, a friend was having trouble emailing me. I asked her to send me the source of the message. In there, I found this:  My A records point to my server. My MX records point to Google Apps.

Can't receive emails from Hotmail: fixing their buggy DNS process

Shadow libraries, that is, illegal massive repositories of books of all kinds, are of course prone to takedowns by police and disappearance from the internet. In recent days, one of the most prominent shadow libraries, Library Genesis (libgen), was taken down and its archive removed from public consumption.

Shadow libraries, that is, illegal massive repositories of books of all kinds, are of course prone to takedowns by police and disappearance from the internet. In recent days, one of the most prominent shadow libraries, Library Genesis (libgen), was taken down and its archive removed from public consumption. The takedown of LibGen was no massive shock. Indeed, several projects were already continuing LibGen’s legacy.

The Lineages and Inheritances of Shadow Libraries and their Documentation

In the world of OA publishing, there have been further (not-so)shock waves reverberating this week as Knowledge Unlatched was sold to Wiley.

What is the relationship between legal form, governance, and ethics?

I have a series of book projects in train at the moment and wanted to write a little bit of this down so that I have a record of where I was in the projects at this stage: 1. Eve, Martin Paul, and Jonathan Gray, eds., _Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access_ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020) is currently in the final stages of production.

Academic books I'm writing

I have a script (a custom static site generator) that produces the output at https://ticitaci.com – a page for the record label on which I have released music (and that I really, really love).

I have a script (a custom static site generator) that produces the output at https://ticitaci.com – a page for the record label on which I have released music (and that I really, really love).  It generates the data from the MusicBrainz records, which I maintain. I have a load of local files that the script uses to generate the pages.

Using a public API, or the instability of MusicBrainz IDs

Some incomplete notes on the introduction to Gaskill, Nicholas, _Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), [originally a Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/martin_eve/status/1422458629555433487). This morning, I am kicking off by reading Nicholas Gaskill's "Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color". Amusingly, I'm reading it on an e-reading

Notes on Nicholas Gaskill's Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color

"End-stage renal disease is a terminal illness with a glomerular filtration rate of less than 15 mL/min." - [Hashmi et al.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK499861/) My current state is an estimated GFR of 7 with dialysis 5 days per week to replace my destroyed kidney function. But the basic fact remains that this condition is terminal; it's just the question of how long it takes to finish me off.

How long have I got, doc?

University of Lincoln

That's a pretty specific title, I suspect, but as I am learning with the Open Library of Humanities, we're in uncharted territory, a place where the specifics matter.

Being called to account: tax considerations for UK-based collectively-funded open access publishers

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.

What to do when your Tor relay isn’t listening

What is the point of a citation? As Anthony Grafton puts it in his history of the footnote, “the culturally contingent and eminently fallible footnote offers the only guarantee we have that statements about the past derive from identifiable sources. And that is the only ground we have to trust them” (233). So the point of a footnote/citation is to be able to lookup and check that epistemic claims are true? Sometimes.

Citations and addressability

There's a lot of focus in the scholarly communications space on transformative agreements for the mega-publishers. Indeed, most of the discourse, most of the time, is about the big publishers in this space. They play Big Bad Wolf with their exorbitant profit margins and make for an easy target.

Small publishers and subscribe to open

Last weekend I converted my website hosting to an infrastructure-as-code solution. It's no big deal, I thought. It's just a static site so it must be really easy to provision this. Surely just some kind of AWS S3 bucket associated with a custom domain? I mean, generated static sites are great. They are fast, lightweight, and virtually un-hackable. Surely it must be easy to deploy this?

Static site hosting in the cloud should not be this hard in 2022

The title of this post refers not to the classic 1987 single by Run-DMC but, instead, to the trickiness of rheumatoid arthritis and vasculitis as multisystem inflammatory disorders with a range of diverse outcomes.

It's Tricky

I examined a Ph.D. thesis this week. I usually do about two or three of these a year. I was curious to work out how long it takes to undertake this task, so in my slightly obsessive fashion, I got cracking on the time tracking.

How long does it take to examine a PhD thesis?

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.

On the costs of scholarly communications and the discourse of 'fairness'

On the same day as I [submitted my next book manuscript](https://eve.gd/2021/01/03/i-have-submitted-the-warez-book/), I am pleased to be able to say that [Reading Peer Review](https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/reading-peer-review/42F027E4C67D246DD8C3AC440A68C7A7), my 7

 th

academic book, has been published by Cambridge University Press.

Reading Peer Review is published today!

This post forms part of my '[aspects of the novel](/2022/01/04/aspects-of-the-novel/)' collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subject. They implicitly or explicitly describe a canon not of my own making or choosing and replicate this from various sources. The original encyclopaedia articles are far more comprehensive, nuanced and worth consulting.

The Baltic States and the Novel

# Affect Theory To be blunt, the past two and a half years have been terrible for me. Certainly, [they have been worse for others](https://getevusheld.uk/4_patients.html). But I have spent the last two years feeling that basic activities in public pose an existential threat. The isolation of shielding is bad -- but I do have my lovely wife and our little dog, so I am fortunate in that respect.

A glimmer of hope

The Asian-American Novel

A journalist recently asked me for a comment on why I, as an academic who studies academic publishing, signed [a petition](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nwWTW2sNrkn9mwxtcUBcGVZL2x6hXv7FOX3P_3VgTLA/edit) calling for the retraction of Mead, Lawrence M., ‘Poverty and Culture’, Society, 2020 . I wanted to publish my full reasoning here ahead of any publication that might quote me. When I saw this petition circulating, I took time to read the

Retractions against racial discrimination

In ultra-exciting news -- thanks to my Leverhulme Prize -- I am very pleased to be able to be able to say that my book,

 Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell's
 
 Cloud Atlas
 

, is now openly accessible (gold OA under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license) at Stanford University Press!

Close Reading with Computers is now open access at Stanford University Press

The Lenovo G580 comes with Windows 8. It is possible to permanently lock yourself out of the operating system if you begin with a Microsoft account and migrate this to a local account. Further, you won't be able to rescue the system since _it is impossible to enter the BIOS setup in the machine's default state if you cannot login to Windows_.

An important note if you have a Lenovo G580

The third conference I attended last week was a day called SuShI. The idea was to bring together the humanities and business worlds. It was, from my extremely critical Leftist perspective, a somewhat strange event. I attended talks on advertising and creativity schematising business theorists. I have to say that, although left still not entirely persuaded by the contents of their papers, it was an extraordinary fusion.

Sussex-Southampton Initiative: SuShI. An interdisciplinary fusion.

It seems that 2012 really was the “tipping point” for Open Access, especially in the UK. The Finch Report has mandated OA for RCUK-funded projects and the implementation phase is now hastily underway. No longer can Open Access be seen as a minority issue; it's here and it's here to stay. As one struggle ends, another begins though, like a grim phoenix rising from the ashes.

The Grim Phoenix: The New Challenges for Open Access

The Brazilian Novel

18th-Century British Isles

As part of my 2021 research leave project, I am reading various encyclopaedias of the novel. As there is no way I could remember all that I have read, I have decided to make some notes in publicly accessible blog format. This post will serve as the coordinating index. The notes on these pages are much condensed and provide some indicative readings on the subject matter but by no means cover the full breadth of the encyclopaedias themselves.

Aspects of the Novel

2021 was another pretty bad pandemic year, in many ways. For those of us with immune system compromise it was alarming to see a near-wholesale return to "normality" among the general population when our lives remained under extreme threat.

My 2021 year in review

This week, I decided that I should move my VPN system that I run on all my devices to use the new Wireguard protocol, replacing the OpenVPN setup. To do this, I used [NetMaker](https://github.com/gravitl/netmaker) for the configuration and setup and I have to say that it is superb. It works a treat on systems that have Wireguard easily installed and you then get a really neat web interface for administering clients.

Replacing OpenVPN with Wireguard, including on Synology devices

Most major studies of the discipline of English that I know of, such as Gerald Graff's _Professing Literature: An Institutional History_ (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989) and Franklin E. Court's _Institutionalizing English Literature: Culture and Politics of Literary Study, 1750–1900_ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), situate its birth as “English language and literature” in 1828 at the University of London (referring

Birkbeck: The Oldest University English Department in the World? (and a new Oscar Wilde lecture at Birkbeck)

Throughout the works of Michel Pastoureau (at least in his books on Black and Green) are sketched ideas of the notion of a "chromoclasm". The proposition that Pastoureau seeks to advance is that the austere aesthetic favored by Zwingli, Calvin, Melanchthon, and Luther – linked to the avoidance of graven images and varying levels of iconoclasm – reoriented the color spectrum around a ‘black-gray-white axis’ ([p.

On the Chromoclasm, the absence of colour, and notes towards a translation of Michel Pastoureau's ‘L’incolore n’existe Pas’

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.

The Publisher's Association's impact assessment on OA is pretty much as you'd expect

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

How much optimism?

One of the basic tenets of digital philosophy is that downloads are non-rivalrous. When I download something it remains accessible to other users to download. But what if this isn't actually true and what if there is a strong disutility premise at work? Bitcoin has not done much for the world, but it does provide a useful reference point for thinking about this.

What if downloads are not actually non-rivalrous?

My Ph.D. supervisors were not particularly hands on. This was not slacking on their part -- it suited me just fine and they could see that I had the thesis project in hand. There was a lesson from one of my supervisors that I will never forget, though. I was writing my first conference paper proposal/abstract. I felt it wasn't quite right and asked for his advice.

An anecdote on editing

By necessity, the bibliography to [my book on Warez](https://punctumbooks.com/titles/warez-the-infrastructure-and-aesthetics-of-piracy/) must cite a number of unconventional works that are not covered by standard style manuals. In particular, I need to make reference to NFO files that contain ASCII art and other iNFOrmation about the Warez Scene.

Citing Pirate Artifacts

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.

Zotero and auto-downloading open access books

Some of my draft responses to the [UKRI OA consultation](https://www.ukri.org/files/funding/oa/open-access-review-consultation/). **Q1. To what extent do you agree or disagree that it is clear what research articles are in-scope of UKRI’s proposed OA policy (see paragraph 46)?** Agree **If anything is unclear, please explain why (1,350 characters maximum, approximately 200 words).** This could be made clearer by specifying that the technical

My draft response to the UKRI OA consultation

This morning marked the culmination of a long period of work for the chapter on the history of digital whitespace [in my forthcoming book, _Paper Thin_](https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/31744/). The chapter ranges across a variety of subjects, from the history of paper coloration, through visual display unit technologies, before eventually settling on musical (silent) seriality as the best metaphor for how whitespace is encoded and

Paper Thin: moving on to Chapter Four and seven propositions

The government has told us that we must “learn to live with the virus”. It is undoubtedly true that coronavirus is not going to disappear any time soon. However, a sizeable minority of people cannot learn to live with a virus that continues to pose a deadly risk. I suffer from panhypogammaglobulinemia. This unpronounceable condition was triggered by the chemotherapy drugs that I received a decade ago.

Abandoning restrictions should not mean abandoning the vulnerable. We need policies to help those who remain at risk.

This week, over Christmas 2024, I have read two pieces about digital preservation: Ian Milligan’s

 Averting the Digital Dark Age


 1

and Ageh

 et al.

’s “The Preservation of Knowledge in the Digital Age” for Arcadia.

 2

It is, in truth, fairly difficult to reconcile these two accounts of the state of digital preservation.

History and Digital Preservation

“Content drift” is an important concept for digital preservation and web archiving. Scholarly readers expect to find immutable (“persisted”) content at the resolution endpoint of a DOI. It is a matter of research integrity that research articles should remain the same at the endpoint, as citations can refer to specific textual formulations.

Evaluating Document Similarity Detection Approaches for Content Drift Detection

It’s an exciting time in the OA book world because many experiments are coming to fruition. We’ve seen MIT’s recent D2O offering; Michigan has a new membership programme; punctum books and Open Book Publishers are on the go; Springer is piloting a scheme with Berkeley;

What’s happening at the moment with open-access books?

Do you think that the Subscribe-To-Open model could be applied to new academic presses who have no backlist?

Yes. The Open Library of Humanities, which I run, does not have a backlist but works on this model. It’s a great deal of work to set up and articulating the value proposition is more challenging, but it’s still doable.

 Thank you for your presentation. You mention usage from 129 different countries during spring 2020.

Questions and Answers from UKSG on Opening the Future

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;

On healthcare economics and valuing lives

Today, in the _Observer_, the Sunday national newspaper of the liberal Guardian Media Group, Will Hutton offered a sobering retrospective of the university crisis during the Covid pandemic, from his position as the former principal of Hertford College, Oxford.

The Observer should not offer column inches to allow Oxford College principals to denigrate other universities

As part of my efforts on Work Package 3 of the COPIM project I am engaged in a project that seeks to convert publishers to business models that will allow them to publish their books openly, without using unaffordable book processing charges (which authors hate and which will not scale). I am pleased to say that, as of today, we can [announce the first press to take the leap: the Central European University

Backlist to the Future: a new business model for university presses and open-access books

After a Herculean effort, coinciding with open access week 2020, our edited volume

 Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access

has now been published by The MIT Press. It's available both in print to purchase and as a CC BY open-access download. I wanted to take this opportunity to write a few words about the goals of the volume, which speak to my interests in open access.

On Reassembling Scholarly Communications: A book about the ethics and egalitarianism of open access

There's an article out today in Research Fortnight detailing [some of the frustrations](https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-research-councils-2020-8-applicants-to-ukri-covid-19-rapid-response-call-complain-of-delays/) that we had with a recent AHRC/UKRI grant proposal.

Rapid-response grants and disciplinary boundaries

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.

Museums continue to make third-party licensing for academic scholarship a total pain

In recent days, several signatories to the Principles on Open Scholarly Infrastructure have taken to performing self-audits of their compliance with the principles. Of course, holding oneself to account in this way is a welcome development. Without some form of self-appraisal it is not possible to know how close one is to fulfilling the goals of POSI.

Rules vs. Principles in POSI

This is a quick post to point out that I will be speaking at the University of Sussex's contribution to International Open Access Week on the 20th of October 2010. Alongside a host of other speakers, I will talk on the pros and cons of Open Access publishing and how it can help with your research.

Speaking of Open Access...

Increasingly in the course of my academic work, I come to appreciate the fact that thought leads many people, independently, down the same path.

Adorno, Benjamin and Wittgenstein (!): knowledge is not property

Over the past few weeks I've been working to pack the entire Crossref database into a distributable SQLite file. While this sounds somewhat insane -- the resulting file is 900GB -- it's quite a cool project for, say, embedded systems work in situations where no internet connection is available. It also provides speedy local indexed lookups, working faster than the internet-dependent API ever could.

Rusting Away (or: packing the entire Crossref database into a SQLite file)

I've been having some serious problems running unoconv, the document conversion tool, on Ubuntu 18.04 using Libreoffice 6. This has been blocking the test suite (and basic functionality) in meTypeset from working. Today, [I found the answer](https://github.com/dagwieers/unoconv/issues/454) with the help of the maintainer! The basic gist is: 1. Uninstall the uno pip module everywhere. Use pip and pip3 to uninstall it. pip uninstall uno.

Running unoconv on Ubuntu 18.04 and Libreoffice 6

Excel stores dates in a very odd way: a serial number of days since 1900.

Converting Excel date serial numbers to Python datetime format

This post is part of an [ongoing series](https://martineve.com/GreenPaper/) where I intend to develop my full _personal_ (_not_ institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to refine this. The Green Paper asks (as question 6): &gt;Do you agree with the proposed approach, including timing, assessment panels and process?

HE Green Paper: response to question 6

Cheap it is not, but the Folio Society Edition of Russell Hoban's

 Riddley Walker

is a beautiful item to behold. The edition itself is limited to a run of 1,000 copies signed by the illustrator, Quentin Blake, and ours is #15. The illustrations themselves are wonderful.

The Folio Society Edition of Riddley Walker

I usually start my New Year's resolutions on the 28

 th

or 29

 th

December. I do this because I don't like the season of excess; I come out of it feeling unfit, bloated, unstructured etc. Last year's resolutions went somewhat down the pan as the pandemic blew everything away. This year, I have some personal goals: 1. I put on 7kg during the pandemic. I want to lose this. 2. I will achieve this by upping my exercise.

Resolutions, and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly Parts of Academia

It is often assumed that researchers submit their work to the highest prestige titles and, when rejected, move down the 'hierarchy' to titles with less stringent review criteria (see, for instance, Poynder, Richard, ‘PLoS ONE, Open Access, and the Future of Scholarly Publishing’, 2011, [https://richardpoynder.co.uk/PLoS_ONE.pdf](https://richardpoynder.co.uk/PLoS_ONE.pdf), p. 29). The irony is that at each stage of this process the paper may be

An irony of the 'hierarchy of journals'

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.

Learned Societies, Open Access and Budgetary Cross-Subsidy

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.

Elsevier threatens others for linking to Sci-Hub but does so itself

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.

Thinking through citation resolution and proposals for consumer-driven, DOI-like metadata repositories

Today I read Kathleen Fitzpatrick's _Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University_, a book that touches on many of my interests (public humanities, open access, reforming university assessments and hiring etc.). I'd already had the pleasure of reading the draft version, which [was available for open comment](http://generousthinking.hcommons.org), but the final edition really did feel even better than that.

Instrumental reading

The UK currently has an assisted dying bill going through parliament and I am very conflicted about it. On the one hand, I am a member of DIGNITAS, the organization that supports assisted dying and that runs a “clinic” in Switzerland to which members who are terminally ill can travel to end their lives. I have no desire for the end of my life to be a mess of literally unbearable suffering and nausea, even with palliative care.

My conflicted thoughts on the UK’s assisted dying bill

I thought it would be a good idea (New Year's resolutions and all that) to make sure I was on top of my finances this coming year. For that purpose, I began to investigate options to aggregate my accounts in one place. There were several online options, but I really disliked the idea of giving an online service my banking credentials.

Account aggregation with UK banks and a free software Lloyds TSB scraper

The Sacred Unreadable Artefact: Digital Preservation, Computational Abundance, and Scarce Access

Martin Paul Eve Birkbeck, University of London This is the text of Eve, Martin Paul (2019) The Sacred Unreadable Artefact: Digital Preservation, Computational Abundance, and Scarce Access.

Text of Digital Library Futures keynote (Cambridge, 21st May 2019)

I have a music release/EP out on Tici Taci records today, called _The Learning Experience_. Available for purchase at: Juno Download Beatport Traxsource Amazon What the critics/DJs are sayin': "This has track of the year all over if for me." "One of my faves from the year so far." "This is a terrific release. Remixes are stellar (naturally) and will go down a storm.

The Learning Experience out today on Tici Taci and my book has gone to print at Stanford University Press

This piece explores the conceptions of terrorism in two novels that stand separated by the calamitous events of September 11th, 2001: Pynchon's

 Against the Day

and Don DeLillo's

 Underworld

, with special focus upon the genesis of these depictions in Cold War politics and notions of capitalist statehood.

Publication: "Terrorism and the Cold War in Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and Don DeLillo's Underworld"

While I agree with much of what they say, in a post on the LSE Impact Blog, Meera Sabaratnam and Paul Kirby write, of the latest round of HEFCE consultations on OA for a post-2014 REF:  This isn't how I read the proposed document at all.

Has "the licensing battle been deferred" in the latest HEFCE document?

Queen Mary University of London

Just been asked some further questions about the DataExecutor class on FreeNode and thought I'd give some usage instructions/clarification here. Howto: Fill a strongly typed dataset  Set your base class (of your TableAdapter) to Tools.genericTableAdapter. Fill your strongly typed DataSet thus: {% highlight csharp %} 	DataExecutor de = null;