I am extremely pleased to announce that my book, Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future has today been published by Cambridge University Press. The book offers a background to open access and its specifics for the humanities disciplines, as well as setting out the economics and politics of the phenomenon. It also has a very fine preface by Peter Suber!

This is a slight departure from my usual more high-minded posts simply to have a rant about the entities with whom I have the most frustrating interactions in my consumer life: banks. Sure, they crashed the economy. Sure, they're trading on fiction and debt. This isn't about that. It's instead simply about how poorly they treat their customers. I have to interact with banks. I wish I didn't. As it stands, though, they are appalling.

Based on Mark Carrigan's posts on music that he finds helpful when writing, I decided to do a quick post with some of the stuff that I'm listening to at the moment, if for nothing more than my own reference. Also, having been fairly ill this week, it's about all I'm up to at present.

In a recent post, I came up with a per-article costing figure, based on Ubiquity Press's economy of scale, for a learned society to go open access. I received two responses to the figure given. One said that it was extortionately high. The other queried whether it was perhaps unrealistically low. What are the real costs of scholarly communication? Often it is very hard for us to know.

Same great sleeve, less waste. Because we care about our planet, this 85% post-consumer-fiber cup sleeve uses 34% less paper than our original. Intended for single use only. US #6863644. But because we care about competing with others and about your perception of how much our brand cares about the planet more than we actually care about the planet, we patented our 85% post-consumer-fiber cup sleeve.

This week I had the privilege and pleasure to attend the Triangle Scholarly Communications Institute event at the University of North Carolina. It was a great event. I spoke about the Open Library of Humanities, had discussions about XML typesetting, positive representations of Sikhism and social challenges of changing scholarly communications.

Amid my travels this month I've been keeping an excited and close eye on the progress of Jo Guldi and David Armitage's The History Manifesto . This interest is both a matter of content and form.

This was a question that I received at a recent event where I spoke. Having set out the economic problems of the subscription model and the difficulties of cross-subsidy for learned societies, a questioner piped up: "We're a small learned society, charging £25 for our journal. We use the funds to give reductions to Ph.D. students and, when people want their articles to be openly available, we let them.

One of the biggest problems faced in the transition to a pure open access environment for journals is that learned societies have become dependent upon subscription revenue to subsidise their activities. This is not an a-historical phenomenon but has emerged most prominently since the 1960s when the societies outsourced their journal productions to either commercial publishers or to university presses.

As I've said before, including in my oral evidence to the UK House of Commons BIS Select Committee Inquiry into Open Access in 2013, non-disclosure agreements in academic publishing contracts are awful.

At a recent talk I gave, I was asked whether open access in the humanities is a "solution without a problem". Without wanting to disparage my questioner, I consider this to be a question born of institutional privilege and of conservatism. Firstly, I consider it a perspectivized take on the situation; just because one cannot see a problem does not mean that it doesn't exist, merely that it is invisible to that particular questioner.