This bank holiday, I wanted to spend some time playing around with Zotero’s automatic ingest of open access books. There are some problems with this. For recap, Zotero offers users a way easily to ingest items using built-in metadata on a page. It supports Dublin Core, various RDF implementations, and COinS. Here’s the problem, though: if you want automatic lookup by ISBN, you have to use the COinS translator/provide COinS metadata.

Springer-Nature has a new report out on tracking APCs. Research Fortnight asked me to comment but didn’t use the full quote, so here are my thoughts on it: I think that the term ‘in the wild’ is slightly misleading/pointed for meaning that publishers were less easily able to track such payments.

Subscribe to Open is a model pioneered by Annual Reviews that basically says that if libraries continue to subscribe, the title will become OA. If libraries drop out, it goes back to being subscription. A good point that Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe brought to my attention is that this poses problems for the status of the title under Plan S provisions. Is this a type of hybrid publication?

In ultra-exciting news – thanks to my Leverhulme Prize – I am very pleased to be able to be able to say that my book, Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas , is now openly accessible (gold OA under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license) at Stanford University Press! It will soon be in the OAPEN Library and on the Stanford site, but for now it’s freely available in BIROn.

I have a series of book projects in train at the moment and wanted to write a little bit of this down so that I have a record of where I was in the projects at this stage: Eve, Martin Paul, and Jonathan Gray, eds., Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020) is currently in the final stages of production.

An interesting conceptual dilemma arose today. At OLH we don’t believe that print is incompatible with OA/the digital. (This is usually the part of the Skype call where I hold up my print copy of Literature Against Criticism from Open Book Publishers.) Some of our titles sell print copies at, say, the $40 mark for an issue. This covers the print costs and postage and very little else. Today we had a challenge with this.

One of the strongly recommended criteria under Plan S is that journals provide “Openly accessible data on citations according to the standards by the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC)”. This means, essentially, depositing citation data with Crossref and then marking it as open. This is a tricky task that will be outside of the ability of many smaller publishers.

Some of my draft responses to the UKRI OA consultation.

I note with sadness that William J. Samarin has passed away in Toronto on January 16, 2020 at the age of 93. An all too short obituary notes that he was “known for his work on the language of religion and on two Central African languages: Sango and Gbeya”. In linguistics, Samarin was of course also known for his extensive work on ideophones, playful and evocative words with sensory meanings.

Since yesterday’s post on The UKRI Open Access Review Consultation Document my inbox has been swamped by journalists, librarians, and publishers asking what the policy means for REF. The short answer is that, at the moment, it means nothing. ##What the review says Work funded just by REF (i.e. that acknowledges only unhypothecated QR awarded from the last REF) is not in scope for the OA policy.