Come along tomorrow to celebrate the launch of two books on "openness" in higher education! From 2pm UK time tomorrow, this room will be open for a discussion with Martin Weller and me. This event promises to be really interesting and to showcase a range of thought on open access. Martin's book, The Battle for Open was just published by Ubiquity Press while my own Open Access and the Humanities just came out with Cambridge University Press.

In my recent work I have begun to think of the subscription publication environment in terms of a risk pool. I wanted to use this space to share a little of this rationale because I think it gives us a valuable way of conceiving of projects like arXiv, Knowledge Unlatched, my Open Library of Humanities, and the K/N white paper.

I remain firmly convinced that many (but not all) of the economic problems of scholarly communication are linked to the fact that academic outputs are both vessels of communication and objects of measurement. This is most manifest in the way in which publications are used as measures of worth in hiring procedures, often through proxy measures that give financial power to commercial entities.

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.