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December 2019

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In the meantime, I'm going to bed now. Before midnight. Because I am an autonomous adult and I can. Happy New Year, all!

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The last email I received today was the production schedule for my 2020 edited book at The MIT Press: Reassembling Scholarly Communications. It's going to be mega.

If it doesn't kill me.

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Fluke's _Puppy_ is a truly marvellous album. Just listened all the way through. Gospel choir at the end on "Blue Sky" is sublime.

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I think book proposals are among the hardest things to write, even when you have the full book almost ready to go. It certainly helps to have a really good idea of the contents but it's still difficult to whitttle them down to concise summaries.

Phrasing each chapter via a set of questions is a help, I find. I also get distracted, though, by a desire to go and write every single chapter. Or tweet about how frustrating I find these things to write ;)

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My other half: we won't do presents for each other this year, ok?

Me: yeah yeah cool.

I come downstairs on Christmas Eve.

Me: uh oh.

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Problematic clause in T&F OA agreement: "If we do not receive payment of the applicable APC 6 weeks after OA publication [...] we reserve the right to rescind the Open Access status of your article and to publish it on an alternative licence basis"

I mean, they could sue you, but just to note that a CC license is not rescindable, so they would struggle with this if anyone had already got a copy of the openly licensed file.

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I love the "academic photos at a conference" genre of pictures. They are basically always just someone talking at the podium or someone talking while sitting at a table/in the audience.

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What did nobody ask for? Lord of the Rings: The Special *Extended* Edition.

What have our friends just put on?

...

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Went away with friends on holiday. 3am this morning in absolute agony and was taken by ambulance to hospital. Appears I have an inflammatory bowel obstruction of some kind. Just had a CT scan to determine whether an emergency surgical intervention is required.

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Revisiting open licensing for OA scholarly books in an email thread today and, while I still favour liberal licenses for my work, my thought on this has shifted over the past half-decade. Need to write it up at some point.

the shifts pertain to finance and reputation for both publisher and author and the shifts in library purchasing economies, OA discoverability, and PoD viability

these are really just notes to myself at this point. Need to do a longer post.

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Love the stuff in The Midwich Cuckoos about the forms of social obligation that the law can or cannot recognise and the legal apparatus's fundamental reliance on force.

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My Saturday plans:

1. Bit of writing
2. Bit of reading
3. Exercise cycling
4. Walk by the sea
5. Recording a mix for Sexy Dinosaur from Outer Space (with exclusive new premiere for big forthcoming track)

all missions accomplished!

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My 2019 in review

This was, in many ways, a pretty bad year for me. My health has, to be frank, been appalling once more. It has necessitated treatment with cyclophosphamide in hospital, a chemotherapy agent that makes you feel very unwell and leaves your immune system vulnerable to every vulturous bug under the…

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Pretty soon, we'll need a dedicated "transparency officer" at OLH just to deal with the volume of incoming admin around this. I hope future transparency spreadsheets will include a column for "amount spent on completing transparency questionnaires".

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Just donated the stake and winnings for my bet against myself to Crisis, a homeless charity.

"What prompted you to donate today?"
Me: ...

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It's probably jinxing it, but this immunoglobulin immune replacement therapy - while logistically challenging - is also remarkable. Usually by this point in the year I'm on my 3rd or 4th course of antibiotics and many years have been admitted with pneumonia etc. Not even a cold.

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In a scene I call "post-election still life", I am taking to heart gastroenterology's advice that I consume mostly liquids.

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For the sake of our health service, the homeless, the disabled, teachers, firefighters, even universities, I hope tomorrow that people I know will vote to deny a Conservative majority in the United Kingdom.

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Outcome of today's hospital appt. is that I require relatively urgent bowel MRI. Hoping their hypothesis is wrong or I may need a discussion with a surgical team early next year :/

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Just so those who don't visit hospitals regularly know, I've now been waiting 2hrs and 15mins for a scheduled appointment. Not in yet. Funding situation of NHS is dire and getting worse.

2hrs 30.

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Given the standard and tenor of political discourse in this waiting area, I am glad it is not a hypertension clinic.

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An irony of the 'hierarchy of journals'

It is often assumed that researchers submit their work to the highest prestige titles and, when rejected, move down the 'hierarchy' to titles with less stringent review criteria (see, for instance, Poynder, Richard, ‘PLoS ONE, Open Access, and the Future of Scholarly Publishing’, 2011,…

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My other half has found a most entertaining guinea pig vlog and is now playing it through the TV...

pleased to report that "pigmas" will continue despite the sad loss of one of the pigs

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We think we are now just 7 institutions short of having 300 institutional supporters of OLH. Christmas present for your loved ones, libraries?

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How bad is teaching, you ask? Dedicated vulture programmes now surfacing to help people escape.

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Rewatching the Harry Potter films and I'm pretty sure that OFSTED would be unhappy with slack health and safety arrangements at Hogwarts, let alone Dumbledore's whole "what the heck! Exams are cancelled!" ethos. I've heard that Gove is on it, though.

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I placed a bet on a Conservative majority. If they get it, I'll give all proceeds and stake to Crisis at Christmas (a charity for the homeless). If they don't I will be very happy, but will still donate the stake. But charity like this is not the answer. Needs a systemic fix.

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Insurance companies who hike their prices for existing customers who just auto-renew are such timewasters. So frustrating. Because I'll just call, cancel, and buy the fresh policy. 🙄

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Two of my Ph.D. students submitted their theses today. I hope they are starting the Christmas celebrations early; it's always a real milestone.

It's also a hideous experience submitting: where are the trumpet fanfares, the glorious accolades etc.? Can feel like a huge letdown/anticlimax...

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A question I was asked yesterday was about librarians using unpaywall to cancel subs to titles with liberal green embargoes. My response: this incentivizes the wrong thing. You punish orgs with good policies. Cancel the titles that don't have good green policies.

I mean, is the logic you really want?:

Libs: we want good OA policies.
Publisher: OK, here's one.
Libs: great, now we will de-fund you.

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Off to keynote the Digital Preservation for the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities conference today. Eagerly anticipating discussions re. humanities "data" and open working practices. #DPASSH2019

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Noddy Holder at 7am in the hotel breakfast room.

I should point out that I just meant that bloody Slade was playing that horrible Christmas song, not that there was a celeb in residence

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There's still very little, transport-wise, to rival the childlike glee of pretending that you are driving the DLR.

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I love that the pedantic apostrophe society has closed, claiming that "laziness has won". The apostrophe for elision is literally a way of writing less. So who is so lazy now, eh? Eh?