In a recent essay, Richard M. Stallman, pioneer of the free software movement, asked “what does it mean for a computer to be loyal?” The "tentative definition" that Stallman outlines consists of: Neutrality towards software; Neutrality towards protocols; Neutrality towards implementations; Neutrality towards data communicated; Debugability; Documentation; and Completeness.

2014 was a good year for me. I spent my time mostly working on scholarly communications projects, including the meTypeset software for the Public Knowledge Project and then establishing the Open Library of Humanities with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

I once surprised a friend by ordering tea in a pizza parlor. She did not expect anyone to drink hot tea with pizza. Someone ordering that in Germany where she grew up, or Philadelphia where she lived, would be surprising. But it would be just as surprising in my hometown of New York. I asked for “tea” as an experiment. As I predicted, the waitress was not surprised by my order, and brought a large glass of iced tea.

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.

In the wake of the death of Marion Barry, the former Mayor of Washington, DC, one of the most striking revelations was how many people had believed at one time that he was actually a husband-and-wife couple named “Mary and Barry.” Aaron Naparstek, founder of Streetsblog, tweeted about this misconception and then discovered that lots of other people had also mentioned it. The sociolinguist David Bowie mentioned that as a child he thought

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.