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.

An interesting discussion today with one of my senior publishing technology developers, Mauro Sanchez, led me to thinking about the rights of presentation and author rights to object to derogatory treatment of work published in scholarly journals. Namely: in the digital age, if one has a publication in a journal, what rights do the publishers have to change that platform and the underlying objects of publication?

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.

Stare him in the eyes when you think he's folding You play your luck with the cards you're holding You throw a double six with the dice you're rolling You gotta test your luck to break the moulding Rummy and Patience and Texas hold 'em Blackjack and Poker and Solitaire loading Crossing all your fingers, here's to hoping Scattering chips that's the way you're rolling Cashing and acting and full-house holding Begging and stealing and cheating

This is an author’s accepted manuscript of an article accepted for publication in _LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory_. It is made available, here, [on a personal website with no embargo](/images/Eve-LIT-Egan.pdf) and will also be available in Birkbeck’s institutional repository 18 months after publication, as per Taylor & Francis’s OA policy at the time of acceptance.

In the acknowledgements to _Close Reading with Computers_, I write: > I came to the computational study of novels through a chance intersection of two of my main life interests: literature and computer programming. Before I was an academic, I was a computer programmer. At age seven I was incredibly lucky to have an information technology teacher – Andrew J. Read – who had written a book to teach children to program in the BASIC language.

Birkbeck, University of London, my institution, has [pulled out of all national league tables](http://www.bbk.ac.uk/news/league-tables). I think this is a good move. In my opinion, league tables are poisonous instruments of marketised higher education premised on nebulous ideas of market consumer "choice" for students.

It has been a pretty epic editing process and one that I would not be in a hurry to repeat any time soon, but I am pleased to say that the volume that I am editing with Jonathan Gray is pretty much ready to go back to The MIT Press and should be done this month. Below is the chapter table of contents for _Old Traditions and New Technologies: The Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Open Scholarly Communications_.