I'm pleased to announce the publication of the open access booklet, Collins, Ellen and Milloy, Caren and Stone, Graham, Guide to Creative Commons for humanities and social science monograph authors, Baker, James and Eve, Martin Paul and Priego, Ernesto (eds.), OAPEN-UK and Jisc Collections: 2013. As you can see from that list, I was privileged enough to be invited to edit this important guide.

In this piece on the future of peer review for the British Academy, I assert that, in the humanities: OA is not about abandoning peer review but it does provide the opportunity to rethink its role and our methods. 67% of existing OA journals do not charge APCs and yet academics have tended to steer clear of them.

This book chapter was written in 2010, but is finally out! Eve, Martin Paul, ‘The Botnet: Webs of Hegemony/Zombies Who Publish’, in Zombies in the Academy, ed. by Andrew Wheelan, Chris Moore, and Ruth Walker (Bristol: Intellect Press, 2013), pp. 103–117 The scholarly communication structure at present bears a strong resemblance to a malware system called a botnet.

Soft or hard “g”? It’s been in the news lately in relation to the file format “gif,” which is currently enjoying a renaissance as a new generation discovers its usefulness in creating annoying animations. This week the “creator” of the Graphical Interchange Format weighed in that he’s always pronounced it with a soft “g.” Arika Okrent gives some historical context on the sources of “g” words in English.

If you are experiencing crashes when you update your mpd library on Ubuntu 12.10, the fault is with libmad0. This can be fixed by installing libmad0 from Debian Wheeze. As root: I can confirm that this has fixed my update crashes. When I get to the box itself I'll confirm whether audio playback still works!

Dealbreaker’s Jon Shazar reassures us by excluding Green Cannabis from the category of “marijuana hedge fund,” contrary to its earlier inclusion by HedgeCo. It’s just a privately traded manufacturing company – of cookies and candy made with marijuana. But hedge funds might invest in it! It’s not clear where these would be sold.

Yesterday Tyler Schnoebelen posted an important warning to anyone who thinks translation is simple, by going through various translations of the quote “the stuff that dreams are made of” from the movie the Maltese Falcon .  Unfortunately it’s even worse than he says, because the official French translation, at least, is not very good. One spring evening when I was in college in Paris I went out to see Casablanca .

I decided that the best way to spend this Sunday morning was to try to get free_cite, a citation parsing system, running on my server. Turns out this is easier said than done; the README provides no information on which versions of different software you need and also gives no advice on setting up the ruby environment.

My friend Dan Parvaz, who is a registered American Sign Language interpreter, posted yesterday on Facebook that it was Interpreter Appreciation Day. Further investigation reveals that this day is intended specifically for sign language interpreters, but spoken-language interpreters work hard and deserve appreciation too.

A quick plug for a blog post by a member of OLH's internationalisation committee, Erika Corradini. In her piece, The Languages of Academic Publishing, Erika writes: Read more over at Erika's blog. Internationalisation of New Open Access Initiatives was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on April 27, 2013.