Newest thoughts →

September 2015

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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".

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

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

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