Newest thoughts →

April 2021

Wow. This is such an incisive review. It really highlights the challenges we faced in categorising chapters, in marshaling dissenting views, and in the ethical goal that we wanted for the text. The hardest book (of 9 so far) that I have worked on. https://t.co/NTLOsnlBeb

I've said this before, but the "public access" mandate compliance checker on Google Scholar is so bad. Here it thinks UKRI funded one of my blog posts.

Here's a paper funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that it thinks was funded by the German Research Foundation

I've been using Grammarly for academic writing. I'm well aware of how irritating their Youtube adverts are, but I think it's a brilliant tool for simplifying sentences and increasing clarity. It really forces you to take care with what you say and how you say it.

Really excited this week! I've got Press agreements for my 1st academic book (Palgrave, 2014) and my 10th (Stanford, 2022) to be open access. And all books in between. Hurrah!

Well, that's a first. Book editors awarded me a prize for being the first to submit my chapter! 😂🏆

A first in every way. See what I did there?

@pj_webster didn't tell me about this in his book on edited collections!

I've got quite a bit of reading to get through today - student work, other documents. It's be silly not to work here, I feel.

It'd!

I see UCU's "your elected negotiators have agreed a set of principles for resolving this long-running dispute which are achievable and far superior to what Universities UK has put forward"... could they tell us what these are?

I sit down for call #1 of the day at 10am. Bang. Internet dies. :(



thanks @ScholTom for that humorous interlude :P

I am waiting on loads of exciting emails that I know will be coming at some point soonish. However: COME ON EXCITING EMAILS. ARRIVE! ALL I AM ACTUALLY GETTING IS ADMIN.

The vaccine seems not to have worked for me with my wrecked immune system. Sadly, this means I need to stay shielded and I need everyone else to get the vaccine if I'm to be protected. Please get your jabs when you can!

Lots of caveats. T-cell responses might be there. Test sensitivity to vaccine induced antibodies not entirely clear. But this is also what immunology said was most likely with my immunodeficiency.

One of the best things about my other half is that I come down after a day's work to find a new shelf with a toy mouse on it, or a similar surprise.

Also, @Mauro__MSL__ and @ajrbyers have been hard at work on Janeway 1.3.10. A massive release with a snazzy overhaul of the review decision page, easier reviewer assignment (that I wrote!), Crossref deposit improvements, draft decisions workflow. Lots more.

Good to have this confirmation from a tutorial that a key point in playing guitar is playing the right notes in, as Eric Morecambe put it, the right order.

"When it comes to the Vector’s main purpose, sound design, it... feels more akin to some soft synths out there, with its... Linux/arm architecture."

Errm. I presume, if it's running Linux, it *is* a software synthesizer.

I have had both vaccine jabs, which is great. However, my immune deficiency means that they don't know whether I can mount an antibody response to the vaccine. So, today, I've taken a private antibody test that should give an indication of any response.

The worst it can tell me is what I already fear - that I have no antibody response and must remain shielded. The best is that I may have some protection.

The Doghouse is a lovely programme in many ways, but it's so frustrating seeing people saying "I don't think the dog liked me" after having met him/her for 5 minutes. The dogs are often traumatised at being abandoned and need someone to reach out to them.

It's not about you when you adopt a dog. It's about what you can do for them.

I note @lisalibrarian in the audience at the @sussexlibrary #hiveseminar where I am currently speaking and will now brace myself for rigorous questioning :P

Excellent. Birkbeck is the first university in London to receive a "University of Sanctuary" award from the City of Sanctuary project. The award marks the provision of educational opportunities to people fleeing violence and persecution through the Compass Project.

It is now time for me to do one of my least favourite administrative tasks of the year: the OLH annual charity commission return.

In case you are wondering why this is painful...

I am giving 4 conference papers this week. Today I'm speaking to ICOLC about OA monograph funding and doing a podcast on my recent book, Reassembling Scholarly Communications. Tomorrow I will speak at Sussex on Rights Retention policies before a keynote at Giessen in the evening.

Another preview from my Sussex talk

This morning I am doing some testing of the OLH backup infrastructure(s). In particular, I am about to do a full power-failure test to ensure that the uninterruptible power supplies protect the backup units and that they shut down promptly.

Beautiful. We're looking good.

That's what we want to see

By way of explanation - this means that, if the power fails here, all of our backup servers shut down gracefully, avoiding any hard drive damage from powering off without unmounting the drives. This is made possible thanks to these enormous batteries that sit under my desk.

I think that @Calendly is nearly perfect, except it doesn't seem to have the group polling to "find a date" that you get in Doodle for external teams. The one weakness.

I am getting really hacked off with a very well-known academic press here. They keep telling me things in their emails that are *simply not true* about the publishing contract. "You may upload earlier versions to the repo". Me: "where does it say that in the contract?"

Hint: it is not in the contract.

This is a difficult case because I don't want to let the editor of this edited collection down; I wrote it as a favour to her on very short notice.

Top email of the day.

"i'm interesting in your article/tutorial creating an irc frontend from a c# application."

"first of all, i don't understand C#"

Today's a long day with COPIM meeting from 8-10pm, so I've taken Toby for a walk down the beach to clear my head.

I'm seeking out a piece of good news to celebrate every day. Today it is that we have our 300th university supporting @openlibhums. It's Stanford.

Is it direct discrimination to ban extremely clinically vulnerable people from football matches (as per the news)? Undoubtedly yes.

Would I, as an extremely clinically vulnerable person, attend such a fixture? (Even if I did like football.) No. It would be suicidal.

I have had an opportunity to read your paper “JSON-Encoded Textual Variance Between the Published Versions of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas” which is published in Journal of Open Humanities Data, and can tell from your work that you are an expert in this field.

I think it's such a mess that I end up doing so much work in my inbox. Most tasks require me to look up a prior email though. This, in turn, though, means that I see every new email that comes in, in real time.

There are tasks that do get me away from my inbox -- turn off and do some work! -- but many, as I say, require that information that means I am back in email land.

I like the pub a lot but it remains seriously inadvisable with my immune system at present. So it's lockdown as usual here.

Realised today that I gave my first talk on the importance of open-access publishing over a decade ago, when I was in grad school at the University of Sussex. I still spend lots of every week working on OA. It looks as though there's decades' more to do, though, despite progress.

I would be totally lying if I said this wasn't wearying work.

Some librarians kindled this interest as well. Particular thanks to @jharvell and @joanna_ball!

I was going to spend the late evening clearing out my bombsite of an inbox, ready for a clear run tomorrow. I then decided that I would go for a sea walk instead. Think this has, actually, set me up better than the emails would have.

Today is a day of programming work for COPIM, frantically catching up from illness, but we also did a video call and saw our niece take her first steps. Hurrah!

My wife likes to listen to audio books to go to sleep and currently uses an ancient Cowon device for this. It's clearly now dying. Any replacement device recommendations? The books she listens to are stored as numbered mp3 files, one per chapter, each book in a different folder.

Pro tip: always start writing your book with double quotes. It's a heck of a lot easy to convert from doubles -> singles than vice versa if requested, because of possessive apostrophes. Sure, you can do it with fancy regex, but it's pretty painful.

a tip learned from pain

Easier. Doh.

The predictable nascent resurgence of the Troubles as a result of wilful political disregard for the Good Friday agreement is one of the grimmest things I've seen in some time. Decades' worth of peace made fragile.

The @openlibhums journal, OLHJ, has now been migrated to @janeway_systems! A few articles in the new system that I wrote.

1. "Opening the Open Library of Humanities" (2015) https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/4400/

2. “Structural Dissatisfaction”: Academics on Safari in the Novels of Jennifer Egan https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/4404/

3. “You have to keep track of your changes”: The Version Variants and Publishing History of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/4426/

4. Reading Very Well for Our Age: Hyperobject Metadata and Global Warming in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/4465/

5. Equivocationary Horseshit: Post-Correlationist Aesthetics and Post-Critical Ethics in the Works of David Foster Wallace https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/4615/

This is great to see. I also published with @OpenBookPublish and it was an excellent experience. Gratifying that it can be read by anyone, regardless of whether they can afford it, but that high-quality print is also available at a sensible price. Also one of my most-cited books. https://x.com/arrroberts/status/1379798216087121920

I think I remember 3x extremely helpful peer reviews all delivered on a good timescale, too.

OLHJ is moving to @janeway_systems and it's quite remarkable seeing it stripped back, internally, to its core OJS skin in the interim transitional state.

A friend posted me this correlation != causality diagram and I'm afraid to say that it has blown the secrecy surrounding the plot of PADDINGTON 3

Been very unwell the past few days and needing some film downtime to relax. Revisiting a two-decade old cyberpunk SF masterpiece.

It's nearly inevitable that at some point, shortly after the end of term, I'll have a terrible vasculitis flare-up. Today's that day and I feel awful. Tomorrow, things should be better again.

A lot of sadness in the world for many people at the moment, but I've just heard of the death yesterday of noted Pynchon scholar, Gilles Chamerois, who edited the first book in which I was published and who was a thoroughly nice bloke. https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/12197/

Gilles wrote mostly in French but also contributed in English to volumes such as Cambridge UP's Thomas Pynchon in Context. He worked frequently with his colleague Bénédicte Chorier-Fryd on topics as diverse as bilingual jokes to genealogies of science in Pynchon's novels.

Just seen a contract that says "You warrant and represent that you shall not permit the Licensed Material to be linked to either directly or indirectly from any external or third party website".