Transformative agreements for OA are all the rage at the moment. Plan S compliance beckons and early movers can make it sound as though they are really doing what’s needed. Yet we’re at a very difficult time with the global pandemic of COVID-19. Library budgets are likely to contract as institutions come under financial strain.
This week for COPIM we are reading Bardzell, Shaowen, Jeffrey Bardzell, Jodi Forlizzi, John Zimmerman, and John Antanitis, ‘Critical Design and Critical Theory: The Challenge of Designing for Provocation’, in Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference, DIS ’12 (Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom: Association for Computing Machinery, 2012), pp. 288–297 <https://doi.org/10.1145/2317956.2318001>. This paper is on the
This week, our COPIM WP2/WP3 reading group discussed Meunier, Benjamin, and Olaf Eigenbrodt, ‘More Than Bricks and Mortar: Building a Community of Users Through Library Design’, Journal of Library Administration , 54.3 (2014), 217–32 <https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2014.915166>. We were interested to consider the implications of participatory design in library architecture for new digital infrastructures.
One of the oft-repeated adages in the scholarly communications world is that ‘the money is in the system’, it’s just badly distributed. This is one of the core problems with APCs; they don’t distribute funds in a similar way to subscriptions, so even if we could afford it, we still have a problematic distribution. What if this isn’t true, though, that the level of funding will remain the same?
Today, I read Andrew Elfenbein’s The Gist of Reading (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018). By any account, this is a provocative and stimulating read that brings observations from cognitive psychology to bear on literary critical concerns. Predominantly concerned with nineteenth-century novels in his examples, Elfenbein nonetheless draws out a broad theoretical framework that I believe has far wider consequences.
A famous line from Jurassic Park (1993) is that ‘[y]our scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should’. I felt much the same, today, reading J. M. Hawker’s Capital Letters: The Economics of Academic Bookselling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) <https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675376>. For the aptly named Hawker tells us, the ‘core purpose of both
Museums continue to make life miserable for academic scholars who wish to re-use their images in third-party publications. I am not against paying museums license fees for images they have digitized, although I believe that Simon Tanner has shown that the overheads of running a licensing department can outweight the actual revenue, against footfall/exposure etc.
I have just finished editing a book collection in which Robin de Mourat, Donato Ricci, and Bruno Latour ask: how does a format make a public?
This week for our COPIM project reading group we are turning to the forthcoming Stuart Lawson, ‘The Political Histories of UK Public Libraries and Access to Knowledge’, in Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access , ed. by Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020), pp. 161–72. This work is not yet published but will be openly accessible when it is,
As part of the COPIM project, my work packages are conducting some background reading groups. This week we are reading Susan Leigh Star, ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure’, American Behavioral Scientist , 43.3 (1999), 377–91 <https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326>. I had read this a long time ago but enjoyed revisiting it. I thought, in a spirit of openness, that I would share my notes on this article.