This morning I have been looking at the UK government’s so-called “Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill”. The politics of this are extremely complicated, but suffice it to say that when the Minister for HE ends up having to say that the legislation will help get Holocaust deniers onto campus, it doesn’t exactly look great. As I have noted before, academic freedom is actually very hard to define and varies between jurisdictions.

This week, cOAlition S endorsed the Subscribe to Open (S2O) business model. This group of international funders is committed to a complete transition to open-access publishing. To date, critics have claimed that the cOAlition has been too wedded to the (inflationary) Article Processing Charge business model, although Plan S is theoretically neutral on this matter.

I posted, a short while ago, about the reprinting of OA books under CC licenses. This is, of course, totally legal and allowed under the more liberal Creative Commons licenses. However, it will, I feel, alienate academics from OA. I think that they will consider it derogatory treatment of their work. In any case, I have now contacted Saint Philip Street Press and asked for my attribution to be removed. This has now happened and it worked.

Do you think that the Subscribe-To-Open model could be applied to new academic presses who have no backlist? Yes. The Open Library of Humanities, which I run, does not have a backlist but works on this model. It’s a great deal of work to set up and articulating the value proposition is more challenging, but it’s still doable. Thank you for your presentation.

I love my Moog Minitaur synth. It’s a great little bass station that packs a punch. However, I have been facing some issues using its full functionality. Namely, there’s a software plugin that enables you to tweak all the settings from the DAW. It controls the synth over midi via USB.

I was thinking idly today – and probably in a wildly unoriginal way – about some of the disputes about subscriptions to software and the politics of this model. It’s no secret that Richard Stallman, perhaps the core philosopher of the open-source software movement, is a problematic figure, most recently so in his comments about Marvin Minsky.

A friend chucked me an old Crumar Bit99 synthesizer from the 1980s. It’s a beast! Lovely bass sounds. Totally unusable interface. See figure A. However, when I received it, the unit was in a bad state. Terrible fuzzy white noise sound along with every note. It sounded as though it was totally wrecked. It’s actually, though, very easy to restore.

I’ve got great news! I have now released LanguageLab, my free, open-source software for learning languages and music, to the public on GitHub. I wish I could tell you I’ve got a public site up that you can all use for free. Unfortunately, the features that would make LanguageLab easy for multiple users to share one server are later in the roadmap. There are a few other issues that also stand in the way of a massive public service.

Non-vulnerable people perhaps don’t understand why the government advice to shielders is so frightening. I think I can give a flavour though: Shielding is to be eased on the 1st April. Nobody in the “extremely clinically vulnerable” group – whom the virus would likely kill – will have had their second jab by this point. Infection levels are still around 5,000-6,000 new cases per day, nationwide. This is not low.

I have to admit, today, that I was wrong about the risk of others reprinting open-access monographs produced under a Creative Commons license. An outfit called “Saint Philip Street Press” has reprinted (on demand) the entire catalogues of Open Book Publishers, Ubiquity Press, UCL Press, and others. Here’s my Literature Against Criticism for sale, for instance.