This week, our COPIM WP2/WP3 reading group discussed Meunier, Benjamin, and Olaf Eigenbrodt, ‘More Than Bricks and Mortar: Building a Community of Users Through Library Design’, _Journal of Library Administration_, 54.3 (2014), 217–32 <[https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2014.915166](https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2014.915166)>. We were interested to consider the implications of participatory design in library architecture for new digital

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](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?

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.

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.

Springer-Nature has a new [report out on tracking APCs](https://group.springernature.com/gp/group/media/press-releases/apcs-in-the-wild-white-paper/17855784). Research Fortnight asked me to comment but didn't use the full quote, so here are my thoughts on it: I think that the term 'in the wild' is slightly misleading/pointed for meaning that publishers were less easily able to track such payments.

Subscribe to Open is a model pioneered by Annual Reviews that basically says that [if libraries continue to subscribe, the title will become OA](https://eve.gd/2018/01/21/how-learned-societies-could-flip-to-oa-using-a-consortial-model/). If libraries drop out, it goes back to being subscription. A good point that Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe brought to my attention is that this poses problems for the status of the title under Plan S provisions.