I recently participated in the American Historical Association’s open peer review experiment on the manuscript of ‘History Can Be Open Source’. I enjoyed reading the manuscript and welcomed the experiment. I would like to offer some experiential observations on the meta-process, in the open. I’ve used CommentPress before, so the technology was familiar.

Large language models make it entirely trivial to generate endless amounts of seemingly plausible text. There’s no need to be cynical to see the virtual inevitability of unending waves of algorithmically tuned AI-generated uninformation: the market forces are in place and they will be relentless.

A note to self (and others) for when this problem happens again. My university today updated the certificate for their OWA webmail service, signed by a certificate authority that I did not have in my trust chain.

I’m very excited about a new face mask I designed.  You can order it online! I was inspired by two tweets I saw within minutes of each other on July Fourth.  First, Médéric Gasquet-Cyrus, a professor at Aix-Marseille, posted a picture of  his colleague Pascal Roméas wearing a “triangle vocalique” T-shirt designed by the linguistics YouTuber Romain Filstroff, known as Linguisticae.

Defining Threat Infrastructures ‘Threat infrastructures’ are platforms that are established or promised to be established solely or primarily in order to change the behavior of incumbent initiatives through fear. In recent years, such platforms have featured heavily in the scholarly communications landscape and have been driven primarily by funders pushing for open access.

Anyone who has followed the UK government’s attitude to the sick and disabled over the past few years will be unsurprised by the way they are relaxing shielding in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

This week for COPIM we are reading Knöchelmann, Marcel, The Democratisation Myth: Open Access and the Solidification of Epistemic Injustices (SocArXiv, 9 June 2020) https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/hw7at.

OLH, obviously, has a business model for its open-access publishing. We operate due to a membership model in which approximately 300 libraries pay an annual fee so that we can exist and publish all our work openly. It works pretty well and is able to sustain our activities – so long as the pandemic doesn’t truly scupper us. Please do join! But the overheads of running that business model are not trivial.

Quite frankly, the current situation is terrifying. Another approximately 400 deaths today in the UK from the virus and the reproduction number (R) is said to be near to 1 (exponential infection rate). The UK has among the worst mortality rates in the world. But it’s being portrayed as the right time to ease the lockdown.

The world is being rapidly reshaped by pandemic conditions beyond our control. This prompted me to do some radical rethinking of my own. What if I could totally reshape copyright law? Copyright does not serve science or research well at the moment. It has pushed almost all current research exclusively into the hands of Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor &