I was having a pretty good week last week, until we got to the closing minutes of play. At that point, I learned that Amsterdam University Press (AUP) had been acquired by the for-profit corporate publishing behemoth Taylor & Francis. This is not really a surprise in some ways. AUP had been transformed into a private, for-profit enterprise in 2019. So who cares? What’s the big deal?
Today, I have been battling a frustrating bug. In the latest versions of Chrome and Edge, users cannot highlight text in Full Site Editor or Post/Page Editor in WordPress (at Knowledge Commons. This turned out to be a complete nightmare to fix. What was actually happening was that highlights were transparent, due to this block of CSS in load-styles.php: .block-editor-block-list__layout::selection { background: transparent;
This morning, having been re-reading and thinking extensively about Moore, Samuel, ‘A Genealogy of Open Access: Negotiations between Openness and Access to Research’, Revue Française Des Sciences de l’information et de La Communication , no. 11 (2017), https://doi.org/10.4000/rfsic.3220 but also the awful news in Tim Sherratt, ‘Update on Trove Data Access and My Suspended API Keys’, Tim Sherratt – Sharing Recent Updates and
tl;dr : cancel your big deals and transitional agreements (they’re not working) and invest in a set of hundreds of non-APC, OA titles offered by Open Journals Collective, which derives from the OLH model. Email Caroline Edwards (at Birkbeck or at OJC) to get involved. This week saw the launch of the Open Journals Collective. My good friend and colleague, Dr Caroline Edwards, wrote about this launch in the LSE Impact Blog.
This week, I took some time out to read Elly Griffith’s most recent book, The Frozen People . I thought this sounded quite an interesting genre-fusing novel, welding together detective fiction and SF/time travel. Sure, it’s hardly the first to do so, but it sounded worth a read. I’d met the author a few years’ back through a mutual connection: Lesley Thompson, another British crime writer.
Yesterday, academic social media went into overdrive as many intellectuals discovered LibGen (“Library Genesis”) for the first time, thanks to an article and tool in The Atlantic . It is quite amazing to me that people have only just come to this.
I am making a concerted effort to make grant applications that I have written openly available. We are far too secretive about these, because we don’t like to expose the cases where we “failed” (didn’t get the grant). I am no different to anyone else in this respect - it’s not gratifying to have to unveil that you applied for 50,000 grants and only got 1 of them. But it’s more realistic. So I’ll try to put up some “failures”, too.
My days working at Knowledge Commons are highly varied. It’s great.
Open source projects like InvenioRDM – on which we rely for our repository software at Knowledge Commons – thrive on community contributions. When initiatives like ours not only use these platforms but actively contribute improvements back to the original codebase, everyone benefits. This “upstreaming” process takes work, but it represents the collaborative spirit that makes open source software so powerful.
As part of my work on Knowledge Commons, I want to make more of our development process open, welcoming, and transparent, by using blogging. So I will be writing some technical posts on what I’m doing there and how I’ve overcome various technical challenges. In this post, I want to set out how I got BuddyPress notifications into a separate application (our new “Profiles” app). First: why am I doing this?
Very few people like thinking about the fact they will die. But it can prove a substantial administrative headache to loved ones if they don’t know about all of your finances, your passwords, your emails etc. At the same time, you shouldn’t be writing down passwords in any document that could be stolen or seen; it’s bad cybersecurity practice.
