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September 2015

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Looking forward to my own OLH article coming out. "Eating my own dog food" as they say. Was terrified of the review process!

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For those interested: staggered release of OLH journal articles until 2016, then rolling after that. Several new journal migrations planned.

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Not sure we're quite ready for that on day one, re. last RT, but (obviously) it is the model I favour most.

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Grr. An hour delay on my trip into London has not made for the best start to what should still be an exciting day!

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It's important because code conditions the possibilities of so much of our lives. Important for contemporary critical thinking.

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Lots of debate re the "learn to code" thing. To be clear, my stance has never been that you should do it b/c that's where all jobs will be.

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Government top tip: protect yourself against inebriated emailing by setting a 56-character hard-to-type password.

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(I don't have a full context for that latter quote as I wasn't at the event. Or the former, but that was 200 years ago!)

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In the past month, an academic referred to open access, which would allow anyone to read research material, as "the spume of the devil".

@RickyPo see the tweet before for the historical comparison I was making.

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Interesting correlation: when Dr. Birkbeck proposed higher education for the working class, he was accused of "scattering the seeds of evil"

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Anyway, I'll stop on here for now, but I really should write some of this up properly at some point. It's been fascinating even to get here.

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We also found out the Catch-22 challenges of setting up charities, interacting with university processes and many other social challenges.

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Because it's a new model, though, we learned a lot. We got a completely new ruling from HMRC on VAT arrangements for models of this kind.

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We opted for the latter and I think we're all the better for it. Social legitimacy through financial security is important.

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Basically, you get flak whatever you do: if you don't launch immediately, you're slow. If you do, you've "got no sustainability plan".

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And there's a form of labour/cost that people often neglect there: it took lots of hard work & travel to get that support.

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We got some criticism for being slow, but doing it this way means that we have a model for sustainability at (essentially) day one.

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Taken us 2.5 years to get from idea to launch of OLH (next Monday). Learned a lot and the slowness helped to shape the new business model.

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As #NEHturns50, I'm actually reading the history of the NEH - Excellence and Equity - at the moment (in all my spare time).

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Daily Mail is a disgrace to the name of "newspaper but just because it publishes something useful, with no evidence, it's suddenly OK?

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Daily Mail story published on basis of "some bloke said he knows a bloke who has a photo"? Hardly a fan of Conservatives, but...

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We need just 3 more institutional signups to @openlibhums to hit 100 before our launch on the 28th. Librarians: help us to make it!

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Media empire that hacked the phones of royal family accuses politician of disrespect to royal family for not singing anthem.

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Thanks to all for listening to our #opencon webcast. T-minus 2 weeks to @openlibhums launch. @the_blochian

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So will anybody on Twitter be saying what the result of the Labour leadership result is? Does that sort of thing happen on this platform?

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Another long hard day of OLH work, but it's getting there! Still on track for launch this month. #openaccess

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Big day for @openlibhums today as we stitch all the parts of the infrastructure together for comprehensive internal testing.

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If we're to have a private funding regime & APC transition, need to start seeing a hybrid payment (public & private) into APCs.

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Thinking about APC offsetting today in UK context. Interesting point: subs are paid for my tuition fees. APCs usually by res. funders.

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Wondering how Ishiguro's /The Buried Giant/ fits with David Graeber's /The Utopia of Rules/ taxonomy. Boatman is a procedural bureaucrat.

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Finally got around to starting Only Revolutions today. It doesn't look like it will get less tiresome & it doesn't look like I'll finish it.

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Hopping to Amsterdam tomorrow for a couple of days of planning re. open-access humanities projects with @jwyg, @lawsonstu and others.

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That also looks like - *shock* - a "predatory publishing" practice in a subscription/sales environment...

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It's a small thing, of course, but I have a pet hate of peer-review requests that are framed as "invitations" or "offers".