Today, along with Stuart Lawson and Jon Tennant, I have submitted the below as a complaint to the Competition and Markets Authority, making good on the advice of Ann McKechin, MP at the BIS Inquiry into Open Access in 2013. The document is also available as a PDF.

For the past five years I’ve been working on a project, the Digital Parisian Stage, that aims to create a representative sample of Nineteenth-century Parisian theater.

The most frequent question that is asked in scholarly communication circles about gold open access is whether a business model is sustainable and/or scalable. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that we are talking about publishing the exact same quantity of material as we are under a subscription model, here’s what that means: Does the model distribute costs in a way that makes it affordable to the actors who pay?

I just wanted to share some of the work I’ve been doing on one of my next book project, which is provisionally entitled The Aesthetics of Metadata: Redaction, Reference, & the Archive in Contemporary Fiction . I have roughly 45,000 words of the project down now (of a projected 90,000-word extent) and I also have an emergent structure.

I’m here at the Kansas University conference on “Envisioning a world beyond Article/Book Processing Charges”. One of the first things we were asked to do was a two-minute lightning talk on what we don’t yet know about a world beyond APCs. I thought that I would share my questions here, for posterity: In removing APCs, how do we keep the visibility of labour?

A fragment of thought: The single largest challenge for the future of information publishing will be to find markers or frames that can accurately denote quality or truth at the level of the article or book (or other form) while still benefiting from the abundance of dissemination that the digital space can offer.

An email I received today about one of my open-access articles: So don’t tell me that nobody is interested or that there is no point in making niche esoteric humanities research open access or that everybody who needs access already has it or that the general public won’t understand your work or that because we charge for teaching we should charge for research. This is just one anecdote, for sure.

I got a paper rejected from a generativist conference a few years ago. A generativist friend of mine said, “Why did you bother submitting your paper to that conference? You knew they were going to reject it.” I said, “Well, the conference was in town, so I figured I’d send something in anyway.” My friend proceeded to tell me a story from her early grad school days about reviewing papers for her school’s signature conference.

As a result of a discussion today, I thought it worth writing out some of my observations/thoughts on a few of the arguments, counter-arguments, and political alignments for and against open access. What, in other words, is the scope of OA? Should it be for work for which authors cannot reasonably expect to make a remuneration by direct sales alone?

Last month I wrote those words on a slide I was preparing to show to the American Association for Corpus Linguistics, as a part of a presentation of my Digital Parisian Stage Corpus. I was proud of having a truly representative sample of theatrical texts performed in Paris between 1800 and 1815, and thus finding a difference in the use of negation constructions that was not just large but statistically significant.