academia.edu is a "social network" for academics. Their latest design mirrors Facebook with its blue header and notification schema. When I saw Ben Lund speak about this at SCONUL, he implied that the outfit wants, in some ways, to disintermediate academic publishers.

In Althusser's Lesson , Jacques Rancière writes: "This reading of Marx via Althusser and Lacan does little more than give a new sheen to a thesis Kautsky had already defended: science belongs to intellectuals, and it is up to them to bring it to producers necessarily cut off from knowledge" Rancière, Jacques, Althusser’s Lesson, trans.

Copyright is generally considered to consist of two components: economic rights and moral rights.

In recent days, there has been a surge of opposition from some members of the scientific community over the new journal being launched by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Aside from the high base-level charge from this publisher, which seems outside of the norm, one of the most controversial elements (also seen with some other publishers) is that the AAAS wants to charge more for a more liberal license.

It is widely acknowledged (in many funder mandates, for instance) that open access for peer-reviewed academic books in the humanities is a harder proposition. The labour invested in their production is quantitatively higher than for a similar journal article and degrees of cross-subsidy are often levelled across a Press's list in order to support scholarship that might not otherwise be economically viable.

I'm extremely pleased to be able to say that my next book is entitled Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future and it will be published by Cambridge University Press in November 2014, with a preface by the esteemed Peter Suber. While print copies and versions for e-readers will be available for purchase, a PDF version of the book will be itself available open access under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

WaterAid is a very good charity to which I would heartily suggest that people donate. I also agree that it would be good if more people gave regularly to charity.

Update from a previous post, now with a final PDF. About This is a Cambridge "FirstView" version of an article forthcoming in Journal of American Studies. This article is copyright 2014 Cambridge University Press. This version of the paper is made available as gratis green open access in accordance with the publisher's policy.

New article out in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication: Eve, Martin Paul, ‘All That Glisters: Investigating Collective Funding Mechanisms for Gold Open Access in Humanities Disciplines’, Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication , 2 (2014) http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1131 # Abstract BACKGROUND This article sets out the economic problems faced by the humanities disciplines in the transition to gold

A great deal of water has passed under the bridge in the two years since the UK government reinvigorated its push towards open access – making publicly funded research papers freely available online. Although there is broad agreement on the policy, vociferous debates have raged over the details of implementation.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the potential for producing semantically rich JATS element-citations by using Zotero's built-in CSL engine. A short while after writing that post, I wondered whether it might, instead, be possible and better to directly link my typesetter to a Zotero database. I quickly mocked up a prototype using an improved version of the libzotero library in Qnotero for the Zotero interaction.