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March 2021

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Shielding advice from the government ends today. It's directly contrary to advice from immunology/my doctors in my case, so I still won't be going anywhere for a while.

It seems very pre-emptive. Most people in the vulnerable group have *not* yet been fully vaccinated with both doses. The vaccine is thought not to work well for those with suppressed immune systems anyway. And infection rates remain relatively high.

"we are not going to provide a legal means to protect you anymore if you can't stay home. Recommend you don't catch the virus though. Lol." - the government, March 2021

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Wow. Those folks at the LRB are very kind (I just gave them a little talk about what I'd done in terms of analysing the contributor network and they sent me all this!)

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Yay! @ajrbyers has been working on "draft decisions" in
@janeway_systems that allows a delegated section editor to make a draft decision (accept/revisions/decline) that can then be checked and overseen by an over-arching journal editor.

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Apart from "Stochastic Parrots" can anyone please recommend me some starting points on the most interesting academic work yet out on GPT-3 and other very large language models?

perhaps @Ted_Underwood ?

@leahhenrickson

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The best thing about citing the Stochastic Parrots paper is that I will get to put an emoji in my book bibliography 🦜

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Although I'm aware that my reviewers might be on Twitter (and I am grateful to them for their comments!), I'm nonetheless going to share some of my attempts to work through peer review feedback on this book, with some wry remarks.

My favourite thing in book peer review, which has happened to me several times:

1. If you don't include an "in chapter 1, I do this, in chapter 2, I do this", reviewers ask for it.
2. If you do an "in chapter 1, I do this etc.", reviewers say you should remove it.

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There's a really fine line with OLH in calling out institutions who claim to "support full open access", whose authors we have published, but who do not contribute financially, despite seeing conclusive evidence of cost effectiveness.

Of course, I understand there are budgetary constraints - and we don't want that to stop authors participating. But some institutions are SO prominent in the OA space: issuing reports, declarations, even praising us, but don't support anything except APCs.

Remember the Jussieu Call
for Open science and bibliodiversity? Couperin a big-name signatory. Some great French universities support us individually. But if we'd had our volume of French authors published at Elsevier prices, it would have cost £100k. Couperin are hard to reach.

I. E. They just ignore my emails.

I think I'd draw the line at naming and shaming individual libraries, but there are some where we're publishing multiple of their authors per year. Library says "it's not a standard subscription". Get with the programme.

Another type: library at the centre of the world of research into OA. Loads of reports. Looks very right-on. We've published their faculty... Doesn't support.

This all ignores the HUGE number of libraries, to whom I am most grateful, who DO support us and make our work possible at reasonable prices. To them: thank you!

Some will argue that's the pitfall of the model. "We were warned" of the free rider problem. Yet I don't believe that. 300 libraries do _not_ free ride. It's just a long haul bringing everyone along.

There are some answers: we could try invoicing APCs to libraries who don't support us and just have an automatic waiver policy. I don't like this so much though.

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Reading the Coalition S Diamond OA report. "The Janeway system that the journal uses is excellent" - thanks respondent 11931066587!

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One of the problems with the economics of scholarly publishing is that mega publishers make billions while small not-for-profit (university) presses run close to the wire. This means that they become unlikely allies trying to argue against cuts to library budgets for expenditure.

But when one group argues this to preserve a 35% profit margin while others argue it just to stay afloat, it's not really the same rationale, although it has the same outcome. A lot of anti-OA arguments from presses are on the same lines.

The problem then with blunt-instrument attempts to penalise the big players financially is the disproportionate knock-on effects feared by small presses.

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Just heard of a very deserving person getting a great job they wanted, helped (I hope!) by a reference I wrote for them. So subtweety but it's a good feeling that I wanted to share.

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There are some tricky revisions yet to come, but overall positive reviews on The Digital Humanities and Literary Studies, forthcoming with OUP

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I really wanted to say "I will be stepping back from leading the platform in order to spend more time with my synthesizers" but thought it required a bit more gravitas than that.

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It's a shame there's no such thing as regression testing in writing. In programming, a regression test makes sure that new code doesn't undo a fix to a previous bug. I always worry at the last stages of book authorship that every addition might have unintended effects.

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This evening's reading, although I'm really not feeling great, is the cOAlition S Diamond Journals Study

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Someone needs to do something about email. 70 new emails between 11pm and 9am. They don't all need a response, but just the triage will take a fair while.

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I do sometimes think it's a bit annoying that eligible retirement age isn't down-adjusted based on "volume of life-shortening health nonsense" that an individual has been through 😂

I am being facetious btw before anyone launches in!

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This Friday I will be presenting at the British Association of Contemporary Literature's panel, "Reflections on Research", on "Publication & the Pandemic".

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'The government has "grave concerns" about the potential for deaths from illegal drugs at festivals this summer.'

So our government does now care about preventing unnecessary deaths? I'm confused.

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I have resurrected everything in my studio except the Waldorf 2-Pole, which I managed to nuke by accidentally chopping the power cable on half, while aiming for a cable tie. I did not get to play with the Bit99 though. Oh well. There is always a next weekend.

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New midi controller has a fantastic scales feature. Can put the device into any scale setting - major/minor/modes/blues scales - and it highlights just the keys in that scale.

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Can someone please confirm for me: is this pictured power supply correct for a device that asks for "12 VDC, 5A, external power supply"? I think so...

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A really important article by @PolaLem speaking on condition of anonymity to a Myanmar higher education head. A grim call for support from international higher education colleagues. https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-world-2021-3-myanmar-people-are-taken-away-at-night-or-now-even-in-day/

You can always, of course, support Cara (the Council for At-Risk Academics) https://www.cara.ngo/

Unclear whether they have been involved in this yet.

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And so Zotero begins chugging away through my 500 page document with 700 or so footnotes to produce the final version. I'll come back in half an hour.

(Not a criticism: I love Zotero. This just gives me a sense of scale on the document! Feels like a conclusion, pressing "go".)

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Pretty sure that you are supposed to use acknowledgements in academic books to form career connections and to list everyone you want to get on with etc. Stuff that in this one. Thanking as many of my friends as possible, who have sustained me through the pandemic.

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One year ago today was my last IV immunoglobulin infusion in hospital. A very frightened ward full of immunocompromised people urgently trying to order high-grade PPE over the phone and attempting to find new places to rent so their partners could live apart to keep them safe.

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Ah yes. The government gets rid of shielding again, along with any attendant support, despite the fact that the clinically vulnerable won't have had their second vaccine by the date of it being lifted.

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Sorry, Toraiz Squid. You were fun, but your space will shortly be filled by a lovely new drum machine.

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I do not feel that "invitation" and "opportunity" are appropriate terms when asking someone to conduct an external examination or a peer review. "Request" is the word.

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Today was also good news. Thanks to the super organizational effort of @ontakragoueke at @punctum_books, I've had extremely helpful peer review on the Warez book, delivered brilliantly quickly. Thanks also to the reader, who waived anonymity and will be thanked in the book!

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This week has also had a full accessibility appraisal of Janeway, charting WCAG compliance etc. A good exercise for us and refreshing to see that, in most areas, we're doing very well. And we know what we need still to fix.

We will be making our assessment public of what we've done, what we're doing, and our route to full compliance.

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I'm also pleased to say that there will be some forthcoming jobs at OLH - more very soon!

This is thanks to some brilliant generosity that I hope to be able to acknowledge properly in the near future.

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Pleased to say that OLH will be forthcoming as its own database in OCLC, enhancing discoverability of our peer-reviewed material.

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Ha! I'm now the most downloaded author in the @BIROnbbk repository at @BirkbeckUoL. Small metric pleasures.

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Been on remix duties and actually like what I made today and didn't delete it all, which is rare!

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Have a plan for the coming year to reclaim the term "transformative agreement" at OLH. By transforming more subscription journals from for-profit publishers to a mission driven, charitable, OA basis.

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Have mixed feelings about today's purchase. Sad, because I already own this very good book by @mkirschenbaum, but it's locked in my office in central London, with no foreseeable way for me safely to reach it. Pleased because it feels like it has arrived for the first time again!

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Next week I get to present my work on networks of literary authorship at the London Review of Books to... The London Review of Books. Quite excited!

LRB

Detecting connections at distance

Going viral

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I've come downstairs after a long day. Thought I'd watch some TV to relax. There's a bloody MICROSOFT TEAMS advert. I've only just escaped this!

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Very cool. @ajrbyers has been working on important localization in Janeway for journal-specific values.

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This AM's research reading is @_akpiper, @cwellmon, and Mohamed Cheriet, ‘The Page Image: Towards a Visual History of Digital Documents’, Book History, 23.1 (2020), 365–97 <https://doi.org/10.1353/bh.2020.0010>

I must confess to really liking the footnote detection and quantification here

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Have to redact it until it's out, but excited to see the first typeset article in our new OLH template, at Marvell Studies

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Government to spend £9m on Whitehall 'situation room'.

Government spent £37bn on nonfunctional Test and Trace.

Nadine Dorries: £6 a week pay rise for nurses 'all we can afford'.

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My wife has got a vaccine date and I can't tell you how happy this news is making me.

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Read an article today on Zoom fatigue that said that faces may be too large/invasive and not sure what they are talking about quite frankly

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"NHS England will see funding fall from £147.7bn to £139.1bn from next year". Seems a great time to be cutting healthcare expenditure.

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Yay! On the day I started work on the next book, the prototype/sample chapter/article version was accepted with minor revisions at the journal.

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It's World Book Day so here's what I've been reading this week: Zadie Smith's essay collection, Feel Free. @birkbeck_ETC

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I must admit, for the first time in weeks I'm really looking forward to waking up tomorrow. Sad, I know, but I'm starting work in earnest on my next book.

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So, an interesting update on the "OA books reprint" saga. I emailed "Saint Philip Street Press", asking to exercise my right to have attribution removed. They have agreed to comply without any fuss. Will be interesting what this does for discoverability of their versions.

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OA books being reprinted under CC BY license

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.…

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It's over a year now since we went out for our @openlibhums party at the last A Love from Outer Space, shortly following the sad death of Andrew Weatherall. It's now over a year later in lockdown with a promised end in sight, although I am utterly sceptical.

When I attended my regular immune replacement therapy shortly after this I realised the shape of things to come. "Antibodies for this new virus will not be in your immunoglobulin until Summer 2021 at the earliest" was the phrase that stuck with me.

Other patients on the ward were frantically ordering face masks, even though there was ridiculous advice not to at that point. In any case, I don't think we're out of the woods yet and I'm just trying to stay focused on what I already have that's good.

Although, of course, I miss my old fun life as much as anyone.