INC

Friction and the aesthetics of the smooth: Ethics in times of dataism

Read an excerpt in English from Frictie over at Eurozine:

Seamless design is an important dogma of dataism. Without unpredictable behaviour, however, there’s no data to retrieve. A wholly predictable future is just a continuous present, a tyranny of choices on offer. But returning to our time-honoured language is similarly impossible. What we need is a politics of de-automation.

More on the book can be found here (in Dutch): Out now: Frictie – Ethiek in tijden van dataïsme, Miriam Rasch

Interested to know more? You may always drop me a line on miriam [at] networkcultures.org

Open Book Publishers

The key to cracking down on climate change? Cracking out the books

By Claudia Griffiths

Conservation Biology in Sub-Saharan Africa, a groundbreaking Open Access textbook, will inspire a future generation of conservationists who will be vital in reversing detrimental ecological damage.

The ‘Climate Chance Summit’ took place in Ghana towards the end of last year. It was attended by many of Africa’s leading environmental players: local governments, businesses, trade unions and NGOs. They faced a grim prospect: Sub-Saharan Africa, one of the most biodiverse areas on the planet, could see 30-50% of its species extinct by mid-century. What’s more, the region, which is already home to over one billion people, is predicted to see its population double over the next forty years. The United Cities and Local Governments of Africa (UCLG Africa) published a declaration after the summit, reflecting that ‘life is from now on at risk on our Planet, in which environment, biodiversity and ecosystems are, more than ever, endangered by our collective incapacity to act and transform our model of development in order to protect and restore nature’.

OBP’s Open Access textbook, Conservation Biology in Sub-Saharan Africa, tackles these hard-hitting issues. It stands as the first open access textbook on this subject, representing a momentous step forward for the Sub-Saharan conservation effort. This is particularly significant since Open Access can play a key role in those areas where poor library facilities, or lack of funds for books, could otherwise be a barrier to the dissemination of crucial information.

The authors, John W. Wilson and Richard B. Primack , are both steadfastly committed to combatting the threats that face our natural world. As accomplished conservationists, with years of experience spanning across Africa and the wider world, they have an unrivalled combined expertise in the discipline. In their textbook, they document, with meticulous factual detail, the region’s colourful biodiversity. This varies from arid scrublands and deserts, to tropical forests and mangroves, which together house over 45,000 species of plants. Thousands of these are still to be discovered and catalogued. Wilson and Primack have selected specialised experts in respective fields to focus in on specific, fascinating examples of species undergoing conservation projects. These range from the Maloti minnow in Lesotho, to the pygmy hippopotamus in Liberia, to the African golden mole and honeybee.

The work offers a wealth of conservation-based strategies to minimise and combat the threats to the Sub-Saharan environment, ranging from the historically distant past, to the present day, and addresses them in both an engaging and accessible manner. The authors emphasise the importance of adopting a forward-thinking attitude, in order to rapidly tackle our uncertain environmental future. This is essential to achieve advancements in the realm of conservation, a field which the authors refer to as a crisis discipline.

‘Perhaps nowhere in the world is this issue as dramatic as in Africa with its rich and spectacular wildlife, but also its significant socio-economic challenges such as a rapidly increasing human population, persistent poverty, and weak governance structures’

Illustrating the hard-hitting nature of the situation, Conservation Biology in Sub-Saharan Africa demonstrates the sheer scale of these environmental barbarities, whose negative consequences are even felt in human welfare in direct and indirect ways. Over the years, corrupt African political leadersvarious politicianshave wreaked havoc on the natural balance of ecosystems and biodiversity by fuelling the illegal wildlife trade, most notably the poaching of elephants for their ivory tusks. The profits from these illicit enterprises often contribute to the proliferation of human rights atrocities.

Interestingly, the authors point out in their chapter ‘History of Conservation in Sub-Saharan Africa’,that exploitation of the biosphere is, if anything, foreign to the region’s ancestors, who historically lived in a kind of symbiosis with their natural environment.

‘Traditional African communities have long shared the belief that humans are physically and spiritually connected to nature’

In a time preceding the seventeenth century, Sub-Saharan Africa upheld a philosophy that communal needs outweighed individual desires. This belief, coupled with a tradition of worship of animal and plant forms, meant that the communities fostered an ethos not only of sustainability, but also of harmony with nature. Unfortunately, this all changed on the eve of colonisation, when the lands were brutally exploited by colonists, setting in motion an environmental crisis that would devastate the African ecological system for hundreds of years. It is against this turbulent background, that, across the years, steps towards sustainability were painstakingly taken.

However, it is now a matter of urgency: The 2018 UN Summit proclaimed that we are the last generation that can stop climate change. Not only is ourHumanaccountability is stressed throughout the textbook, but also so is our responsibility, and capability, to liberate the world from this crisis. Knowledge will be a key tool in this struggle. Wilson and Primack’s comprehensive open access resource is invaluable in its potential to inspire students the world over to cultivate a harmonious relationship with the natural world. It is an essential contribution towards combatting the global ecological crisis.

Open Book Publishers

OBP’s draft response to the UKRI Open Access consultation

Here we share our draft response to the UKRI Open Access consultation. We will answer the questions that pertain to books and chapters, since that is our area of expertise.

Please annotate this post with any thoughts or relevant evidence you wish to share (we have integrated Hypothes.is to make this easy to do). Please also feel free to draw on our answers when writing your own response, if you are submitting one.

If you would like to express support for the arguments made here, you can sign this Google doc, which will be submitted as part of our response. If we make any changes to this draft response, they will be posted on this blog by noon on Thursday 28 May (24 hours before UKRI's deadline) in case you wish to see the final version before signing.

Section B: Monographs, Book Chapters and Edited Collections

Q33. To what extent do you agree or disagree that the types of monograph, book chapter and edited collection defined as in-scope and out-of-scope of UKRI’s proposed OA policy (see paragraphs 96-98 of the consultation document) are clear?

Strongly agree / Agree / Neither agree nor disagree / Disagree / Strongly disagree / Don’t know / No opinion.

If you disagree, please explain your view (2,000 characters maximum, approximately 300 words).

The definitions as given are often subjective and loosely phrased.

A trade book ‘has a broad public audience’: for this to be established, we strongly suggest specific thresholds for the ‘higher print runs’ and ‘changes in the price point’. We believe that an author or publisher who want to make use of this (or any) exception should be obliged to provide the data – in this case: title, price point, proposed print run – so that UKRI can monitor and review the exceptions after a certain period, to see how much they are used. (See Q58 for more on exceptions.) A trade exception is presumably based on a fear of publishers losing revenue – although this fear is not well substantiated (see Q40). We welcome the stipulation on p.27 that if a trade book is the only output from UKRI-funded research it will fall within the policy’s scope. We believe this will help to discourage use of the exception as a means to avoid the OA requirement.
Books that ‘require significant reuse of third-party material and where alternative arrangements are not a viable option’ – how will it be established whether a book ‘requires’ significant reuse of third-party content? What would it mean for ‘alternative arrangements’ to be ‘viable’ or not in practice? (See Q44-46 for more on whether reuse of third-party material is a barrier to OA publication.)
Where ‘the only suitable publisher in the field does not have an OA programme’ – how will ‘only suitable’ be established? What is to stop an author claiming that a publisher is the ‘only suitable’ outlet for reasons of prestige?
For scholarly editions – could the introductory essay be published OA, if the edition itself is not? These might be valuable resources at GCSE or A-Level, for example, especially at a time when many secondary-school budgets are under pressure.

Q34. Should the following outputs be in-scope of UKRI’s OA policy when based on UKRI-funded doctoral research?

a.Academic monographs Yes / No / Don’t know / No opinion
b.Book chapters Yes / No / Don’t know / No opinion
c.Edited collections Yes / No / Don’t know / No opinion

Please explain your view (1,350 characters maximum, approximately 200 words).

Yes to all – in theory. But support is needed: if the author no longer has access to an institutional repository they need a suitable place to deposit the accepted MS (if Green OA is the route – see Q41, 42, 55 & 61). They should also be granted funding to cover the costs of publication for Gold, if this is necessary (see Q42, 53 and 61 on BPCs) or supported in finding a suitable publisher that does not levy such charges.

The language is loose again here: what does ‘based on’ mean precisely? Anything that draws on doctoral research in any way?

There is a significant benefit to this stipulation: at the moment, many people post-PhD are anxious about whether they should embargo their thesis, in the belief that an openly available thesis might hamper their chances of getting a book contract. This perverse incentive to restrict access to research should be addressed urgently. If people are aware that any outputs from their UKRI-funded thesis will have to be published OA, and if they are supported in doing so, this anxiety ought to be allayed and more theses stored OA in institutional repositories with no embargo.

Q35. To what extent do you agree or disagree that UKRI’s OA policy should include an exception for in-scope monographs, book chapters and edited collections where the only suitable publisher in the field does not have an OA programme?

Strongly agree / Agree / Neither agree nor disagree / Disagree / Strongly disagree / Don’t know / No opinion.

Please explain and, where possible, evidence your view (1,350 characters maximum, approximately 200 words).

This provision is highly subjective and open to abuse. What does the ‘only suitable publisher’ mean and how is this to be established? Can an example be given of any press that is the ‘only suitable’ publisher for any academic book? As it stands, this appears to be a significant loophole for authors who might wish to be unencumbered by the OA requirement when choosing their publisher.

In terms of the ability to take on more demanding projects, Open Access presses are often highly innovative and open to proposals that are more unusual and technically adventurous than the standard academic monograph – see for example our own track record of innovative publications.

They are also often able to respond more nimbly to requests for speed and volume – see for example our series The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity by Jan M. Ziolkowski, six books published over seven months that also included over a thousand images.

Further: why should access to UKRI-funded research be held back because a particular publisher doesn’t offer Open Access? We believe this exemption should be scrapped entirely.

Q36. Are there any other considerations that the UK HE funding bodies should take into account when defining academic monographs, book chapters and edited collections in-scope of the OA policy for the REF-after-REF 2021?

Yes / No / Don’t know / No opinion.

Q37. Regarding monographs in-scope of UKRI’s proposed OA policy, which statement best reflects your view on the maximum embargo requirement of 12 months?

a.12 months is appropriate
b. A longer embargo period should be allowed
c. A shorter embargo period should be required
d. Different maximum embargo periods should be required for different discipline areas
e. Don’t know
f. No opinion

Please explain and, where possible, evidence your answer. If you answered b, c or d please also state what you consider to be (an) appropriate embargo period(s) (1,350 characters maximum, approximately 200 words).

Our view, as an OA book publisher that has never imposed an embargo, is that an embargo of any length is an unnecessary restriction on access.

There should be a very good and well-evidenced argument for embedding restrictions on access into an Open Access policy. But on the contrary, in the field of journal publishing, SAGE has argued there is no evidence that zero embargo hurts subscriptions, while Emerald have scrapped embargoes and reported positive outcomes. See Q40 for further evidence that an embargo is unnecessary.

Without evidence for both the need and effectiveness of an embargo of a given length, it is an arbitrary restriction imposed in an attempt to placate worried publishers. If allowed, this must be subject to review after a certain period of time, when the impact of the OA policy is better known (see Q58).

Further: if an OA book is released only after an embargo, a publisher should be obliged to raise awareness of the OA version at the time of its release, and link to it prominently on their website. Otherwise embargoed OA risks being invisible OA.

Q38. Regarding book chapters in-scope of UKRI’s proposed OA policy, which statement best reflects your view on the maximum embargo requirement of 12 months?

a.12 months is appropriate
b. A longer maximum embargo period should be allowed
c. A shorter maximum embargo period should be required
d. Different maximum embargo periods should be required for different discipline areas
e. Don’t know
f. No opinion

As for Q37: we advocate zero embargo. There is no strong argument for embedding this restriction on access into an Open Access policy.

Q39. Regarding edited collections in-scope of UKRI’s proposed OA policy, which statement best reflects your view on the maximum embargo requirement of 12 months?

As for Q37 and 38: we advocate zero embargo. There is no strong argument for embedding this restriction on access into an Open Access policy.

Q40. Do you have any specific views and/or evidence regarding different funding implications of publishing monographs, book chapters or edited collections with no embargo, a 12-month embargo or any longer embargo period?

Yes / No.

If yes, please expand (2,000 characters maximum, approximately 300 words). Please note that funding is further considered under paragraph 110 of the consultation document (question 53).

The sources cited below conclude that Open Access publication does not significantly harm sales – even with no embargo.

Ronald Snijder, “The Deliverance of Open Access Books: Examining Usage and Dissemination” (doctoral thesis, Leiden University, 2019), https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/68465
‘open access did not have a large effect on monograph sales, positive nor negative.’ (p.200)

Eelco Ferwerda, Ronald Snijder, and Janneke Adema, “OAPEN-NL. A Project Exploring Open Access Monograph Publishing in the Netherlands: Final Report” (The Hague: OAPEN Foundation, October 2013), http://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/docs/OAPEN-NL-final-report.pdf. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273450141_OAPEN-NL_-_A_project_exploring_Open_Access_monograph_publishing_in_the_Netherlands_Final_Report
‘OAPEN-NL found no evidence of an effect of Open Access on sales.’ (p.4)

Eelco Ferwerda, Ronald Snijder, Brigitte Arpagaus, Regula Graf, Daniel Krämer, Eva Moser, ‘The impact of open access on scientific monographs in Switzerland. A project conducted by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)’ (OAPEN-CH) DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1220607
‘Statistically, open access did not have a negative influence on the sales figures for printed books.’ (p. 7)

Rupert Gatti, ‘Introducing data to the open access debate: OBP’s business model (part three)’ 15 October 2015, https://blogs.openbookpublishers.com/introducing-data-to-the-open-access-debate-obps-business-model-part-three/
‘Overall it seems that we are selling roughly the same number of books as legacy publishers.’

Ronald Snijder, ‘The profits of free books: an experiment to measure the impact of open access publishing,’ Learned Publishing, 23:293–301, https://doi.org/10.1087/20100403

Rachel Pells, ‘Open access: “no evidence” that zero embargo periods harm publishers’, Times Higher Education, 23 April 2019, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/open-access-no-evidence-zero-embargo-periods-harm-publishers

We have never imposed an embargo on the publication of any of our books, and yet sales are still our largest income stream, and the greatest volume of sales still occurs in the first year of a book’s publication. Our experience, as a successful OA book publisher of twelve years’ standing, demonstrates that embargoes are unnecessary.

Q41. To what extent do you agree that self-archiving the post-peer-review author’s accepted manuscript should meet the policy requirement?

Strongly agree / Agree / Neither agree nor disagree / Disagree / Strongly disagree / Don’t know / No opinion.

Please explain your view (1,350 characters maximum, approximately 200 words).

Books are complex objects, involving significantly more editorial and production work than an article. For many of our books, the 'author's accepted manuscript' would be a poor substitute, particularly:

books requiring significant editorial work, e.g. edited collections with a mix of authors of varying ability in English;
books such as Kate Rudy's Image, Knife, and Gluepot (2019) in which the argument depends on high-quality images, not reproduced in the MS.

Will the MS be cited, especially if it is without page numbers? How discoverable is it, stored in a repository? (See Q54.) Not all publishers review the entire MS: will it then be deposited in its entirety?

Green OA risks being poor quality, hard to find, and little used: bluntly, inadequate. If sanctioned, these problems must be mitigated as far as possible:

The MS must include author edits made after peer-review and it must be the entire MS: this should be explicit. It must include page numbers.
The Green version must be linked from the publisher’s website and have a DOI. See Q42, 54 and 55 for further ways to enhance discoverability.

Publishers have an obligation to support their author, including with Green OA. This route must not permit the publisher to do nothing.

Q42. Regarding monographs, book chapters and edited collections, are there any additional considerations relating to OA routes, deposit requirements and delayed OA that the UK HE funding bodies should take into account when developing the OA policy for the REF-after-REF 2021?

Yes / No / Don’t know / No opinion.

If yes, please expand (2,650 characters maximum, approximately 400 words). Please see paragraphs 29-31 of the consultation document before answering this question.

Since there are many times more books included in the REF than are funded by UKRI, the impact of an OA policy for these books will have a proportionally greater impact and benefit; the challenges will likewise increase.

As we see it, there are two key hurdles to be overcome: 1) that neither the UKRI nor REF policies should be the means of diverting large amounts of public money to pay Book Processing Charges for individual books (see Q53), and 2) a low-quality, undiscoverable Green route should not be enabled as a low-cost, low-effort alternative.

We therefore propose ways UKRI could help to support the growth of BPC-free Gold OA, and how it could improve the quality and discoverability of Green OA books and chapters.

Ways to enhance BPC-free Gold are detailed in Qs 42, 53 and 61. Broadly, they involve supporting projects such as COPIM to create open, community-governed infrastructures and systems that bring down the costs of OA publishing for all, and help to build alternative funding systems, such as support from libraries that will no longer be paying for access to so much closed content. We recommend UKRI asks for transparency from publishers who charge BPCs about what costs they cover and why revenue is insufficient to meet them. We suggest UKRI emphasises it is not willing to support BPCs as a means of funding OA long-term, and that it should consider seriously the ‘scaling small’ model proposed and exemplified by the ScholarLed publishers as a means to build capacity (see Q66).

If Green OA is in scope, see Qs 41, 54 & 55 for details of how its quality and discoverability could be improved. Discoverability is a serious problem for institutional repositories. Deposited work is generally not catalogued in academic libraries apart from the institution’s own (and not always effectively then). It is doubtful the general public is widely aware of it.

Broadly, we recommend: provide page numbers to enable clear citations, and a full text with author edits made in the light of peer-review feedback; ensure that each Green OA MS has a DOI and is stored and shared on a central UKRI platform, with metadata sent to all UK academic libraries; and mandate that publishers must provide a prominent link to the OA version on the book’s home page, and publicise its release if an embargo is applied.

Q43. To what extent do you agree or disagree with CC BY-ND being the minimum licensing requirement for monographs, book chapters and edited collections in-scope of UKRI’s proposed OA policy?

Strongly agree / Agree / Neither agree nor disagree / Disagree / Don’t know / No opinion.

Please explain and, where possible, evidence your view (1,350 characters maximum, approximately 200 words).

Reuse is an important component of Open Access. We support minimal restrictions wherever this is appropriate: CC BY is the licence for most of our books.

CC BY-ND excludes the reuse and remixing of content, which lies at the heart of various groundbreaking OA experimental publishing projects such as Open Humanities Press’s Jisc-funded Living Books about Life or its European-Commision-funded Photomediations: An Open Book.

CC BY-ND would also hinder translation (e.g. Economic Fables by Ariel Rubinstein has been successfully translated into Chinese thanks to its CC BY licence) and the extraction of chapters for use in course packs. (See also https://creativecommons.org/2020/04/21/academic-publications-under-no-derivatives-licenses-is-misguided/)

However, there are occasions when ND or another licence is suitable, including CC BY-NC: e.g. when a book reproduces culturally sensitive content (as is common in Anthropology, for example), which it would be inappropriate to see commercialised. See https://blog.scholarled.org/ownership-control-access-possession-in-oa-humanities-publishing/

We argue that the full range of CC licences should be in scope: CC BY the default, with the ability to make the case for a more restrictive licence. The author or publisher should have to justify to UKRI in writing the use of a more restrictive licence.

Q44. To what extent do you agree or disagree that UKRI’s OA policy should include an exception for in-scope monographs, book chapters and edited collections requiring significant reuse of third-party materials?

Strongly agree / Agree / Neither agree nor disagree / Disagree / Strongly disagree / Don’t know / No opinion.

Please explain your view (1,350 characters maximum, approximately 200 words).

We do not believe an exception is necessary. If any such exception were granted, it would need to be tightly defined and subject to monitoring as outlined in Q58.

There is a prevailing myth that third-party materials create an insurmountable problem for Open Access. We believe our catalogue of OA books demonstrates otherwise. E.g.:

Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives edited by Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow (2017) (89 images reproduced in the book)

Image, Knife, and Gluepot: Early Assemblage in Manuscript and Print by Kathryn M. Rudy (2019) (137 images reproduced in the book)

Piety in Pieces: How Medieval Readers Customized their Manuscripts by Kathryn M. Rudy (2016) (209 images reproduced in the book)

The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity by Jan M. Ziolkowski (6 vols.) (2018) (1,467 images reproduced across the six volumes)

Essays on Paula Rego: Smile When You Think about Hell (2019) by Maria Manuel Lisboa (181 images reproduced in the book)

Dickens’s Working Notes for Dombey and Son by Tony Laing (2017)
(includes facsimile images of every page of Charles Dickens’ notes for his novel Dombey and Son, from the Forster Collection in the National Art Library in the V&A Museum).

Questions 45-46 concern how ‘significant reuse’ may be defined.

Q45. To what extent do you agree or disagree that if an image (or other material) were not available for reuse and no other image were suitable, it would be appropriate to redact the image (or material), with a short description and a link to the original?

Strongly agree / Agree / Neither agree nor disagree / Disagree / Strongly disagree / Don’t know / No opinion.

Please explain your view (1,350 characters maximum, approximately 200 words).

We have done this with two of our books by Kathryn Rudy, Piety in Pieces (2016) and Image, Knife, and Gluepot (2019) with great success. In both, permanent links were given to images that were freely available on the web, rather than paying to reproduce them in the books (in addition to the many images that were reproduced in the book). This practice was part of Rudy’s argument, which called attention to the difficulty of manuscript study when institutions have restrictive policies around image reproduction. It was commended in reviews (e.g. see Elizabeth Savage, The Library, 19:2 (2018), 230-31).

Rudy used funding to make many more images freely available online and then linked to them, rather than using the money to publish them. She thus made these resources freely available online for others. This is a practice that might be taken up more widely.

Rudy’s books are highly valued by readers. Piety in Pieces has been accessed over 10,000 times and Image, Knife and Gluepot has been accessed over 2,000 times. They have been extremely well reviewed and Piety in Pieces won the 2017 Choice Review’s Outstanding Academic Title.

We have since taken this approach with other books.

Q46. Do you have a view on how UKRI should define ‘significant use of third-party materials’ if it includes a relevant exception in its policy?

Yes / No / Don’t know / No opinion.

If yes, please expand (2,000 characters maximum, approximately 300 words).

As demonstrated in Q44, a large amount of third-party material does not necessarily present a barrier to OA publication—so a definition by volume would be inadequate.

The premise that third-party material is automatically a hindrance is flawed. The issue therefore is not how ‘significant’ or otherwise the usage is, but whether the necessary material can be sourced and licensed for use in an OA book, or not. This depends on a number of factors, including the stipulations of the copyright holder, the funds available (sometimes), and the extent to which the publisher is prepared to assist the author in successfully sourcing appropriate images.

There is a wealth of openly available material, increasing all the time (see p.34 of our Author’s Guide for a list) and there are steps UKRI could take to swell these stores (see Q47).

Sometimes, third-party material can be acquired for an OA book in the same way as for a closed-access book. The fact that the book will be Open Access can make it easier, because one can argue that the book is being disseminated for the benefit of all, rather than simply for profit. Sometimes it is possible to find appropriate alternatives that are openly licensed, and sometimes the required material is already openly available.

Successfully acquiring third-party material requires the publisher to work closely with the author, and to support them in liaising with copyright holders or searching open repositories to obtain suitable material. It would be much easier to invoke a ‘significant use’ exception and not do so.

We would therefore argue against an exception of this nature. Instead, if third-party material is genuinely an insuperable obstacle to OA publication, the author or publisher should have to seek an exception in writing from UKRI.

Q47. Do you have any other comments relating to licensing requirements and/or the use of third-party materials, in relation to UKRI’s proposed OA policy for academic monographs, book chapters and edited collections?

Yes / No.

If yes, please expand (1,350 characters maximum, approximately 200 words).

There are two ways UKRI could support authors and publishers with third-party material.

UKRI has an opportunity to take a lead in growing open image repositories. This OA policy demonstrates that Open Access to research has government support. UKRI is therefore uniquely positioned to have influential conversations with national institutions—our museums, libraries, galleries—about openly licencing the material in their collections for the benefit of academic research. UKRI could also collaborate with other funders, e.g. Wellcome Trust and Coalition S, towards the same goal. Access to third-party material is an international problem—there should be collective solutions and UKRI could help to bring them about. This data from OpenGLAM demonstrates the possibilities: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WPS-KJptUJ-o8SXtg00llcxq0IKJu8eO6Ege_GrLaNc/edit#gid=1216556120

The other area is fair practice. Legal precedents support the argument that the ‘quotation exception’ to copyright infringement can apply to any media, as long as the ‘quotation’ is made with the intention of ‘entering into a dialogue’ with the relevant material. Cover images or decoration would be out of scope, but anything crucial to the argument (we might call it ‘significant use’) would fall within it. Fair practice has been limited by cautious publisher behaviour. UKRI could help to support a change here.

Q48. Regarding monographs, book chapters and edited collections, are there any additional considerations relating to licensing requirements and/or third-party materials that you think that the UK HE funding bodies should take into account when developing the OA policy for the REF-after-REF 2021?

Yes / No / Don’t know / No opinion.

If yes, please expand (2,650 characters maximum, approximately 400 words). Please refer to paragraphs 29-31 of the consultation document before answering this question.

As mentioned, the REF will involve dealing with a greater volume of books to be made OA. This strengthens arguments that might be made to national cultural institutions about the importance of making third-party material related to their collections openly available to academic researchers for OA publication. It should be noted that a much wider use of their collections in this way could result in greater awareness of what these institutions have to offer to visitors and visiting scholars, as well as the broader cultural contribution it would make.

Q49. Which statement best reflects your views on whether UKRI’s OA policy should require copyright and/or rights retention for in-scope monographs, book chapters and edited collections?

a. UKRI should require an author or their institution to retain copyright and not exclusively tree ansfer this to a publisher
b. UKRI should require an author or their institution to retain specific reuse rights, including rights to deposit the author’s accepted manuscript in a repository in line with the deposit and licensing requirements of UKRI’s OA policy
c. UKRI should require an author or their institution to retain copyright AND specific reuse rights, including rights to deposit the author’s accepted manuscript in a repository in line with the deposit and licensing requirements of UKRI’s OA policy
d. UKRI’s OA policy should not have a requirement for copyright or rights retention
e. Don’t know
f. No opinion

Please explain and, where possible, evidence your answer. If you selected answer b or c, please state what reuse rights you think UKRI’s OA policy should require to be retained (2,000 characters maximum, approximately 300 words). It is not necessary to repeat here, in full, information provided in response to question 12. Please note that views are not sought on whether institutions should hold the copyright to work produced by their employees as this is subject to Section 11 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and institutional copyright policies.

We believe authors should retain control of their work. It should not be up to a publisher to mandate how an author's work is reused (or not). There is no need for an author to give up copyright or any reuse rights for a publisher to distribute their research.

We have a non-exclusive licence to publish an author’s work in several formats (usually paperback, hardback, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, HTML and XML, with the latter three editions being Open Access). We do not ask for copyright or reuse rights from the author. We have published over 170 academic books, and this has worked perfectly well. No author has abused it.

Q50. Regarding the timing of implementation of UKRI’s OA policy for monographs, book chapters and edited collections, which statement best reflects your view?

a. The policy should apply from 1 January 2024
b. The policy should apply earlier than 1 January 2024
c. The policy should apply later than 1 January 2024
d. Don’t know
e. No opinion

Please explain and, where possible, evidence your answer. If you selected b or c, please also state what you consider to be a feasible implementation date (2,000 characters maximum, approximately 300 words).

As the consultation notes (p.5), the government adopted the position that publicly funded research should be made OA (with a preference for immediate OA) after the Finch report in 2012. By 2024, twelve years will have elapsed since then. Publishers should have been long preparing for a policy of this nature, and many have. There is no argument for further delay except ‘we haven’t taken this seriously until now’ and there is no sound reason to indulge negligence with further postponement.

We believe the proposal that the policy should apply to books contracted after 1 January 2024 is misguided. Instead, it should apply to books published after that date. (See Q52 for more on this.) It can take a number of years for books to progress from contract to publication. We are over three-and-a-half years from 1 January 2024 – time to react to an OA mandate – but if the policy only applies to books contracted after 1 January 2024, it would probably be two or three years later before we see any OA books published as a result of UKRI research. We will then be fourteen or fifteen years after the government adopted the position that publicly funded work should be published OA.

Most major publishers already have an OA programme, and many smaller publishers, such as the ScholarLed presses, are showing that this can be done now. Projects such as COPIM, due to finish late 2022, are putting in place the infrastructure and knowledge to assist smaller publishers to flip to OA.

The COVID-19 crisis is starkly revealing that open access to knowledge – to learn, to teach, to research – is imperative, and that our current systems of dissemination are piecemeal and inadequate. (See e.g. https://blogs.ifla.org/lpa/2020/04/30/2147/) Both ethically and financially, we cannot afford to keep waiting.

Q51. In order to support authors and institutions with policy implementation UKRI will consider whether advice and guidance can be provided. Do you have suggestions regarding the type of advice and guidance that might be helpful?

Yes / No.

If yes, please expand (2,000 characters maximum, approximately 300 words).

Any guidance should not neglect the reasons for this policy. Too frequently, Open Access is discussed in terms of compliance and becomes tedious bureaucracy, resented by researchers rather than embraced. The benefits of OA in terms of impact, engagement and global access should be highlighted.

Information about a wide range of publishers’ OA policies – particularly peer-review processes, the type and quality of OA editions they offer, and whether they charge a fee – should be provided. Sites like OAPEN and the DOAB are useful sources.

Advice should be given to help authors spot when they are being offered a sub-standard or desultory form of Open Access. They might consider:

Are you able to retain your copyright and reuse rights?
Are you able to choose from a range of CC licences, and are their implications explained clearly to you?
Will your book be available in HTML or XML Open Access versions, as well as PDF?
How will any non-OA editions of your book be priced? Has expected sales revenue been factored into any fees the publisher is charging?
Does the publisher insist on an embargo period? If so, what distribution is permitted afterwards?
What is the distribution strategy? Will the OA edition be accessible prominently on the publisher’s website? Will it be distributed to platforms like OAPEN, the DOAB and Google Books?
Does the publisher provide usage statistics and if so, are they transparent about how these are obtained?
What is the publisher’s policy on third-party content? Are they willing to support you in including this wherever possible?
Will your book or chapter be issued with a DOI?

Resources should include information as in this guide we published in 2018, with aids such as a glossary of jargon, information about copyright and CC licences and a set of questions to ask publishers.

Q52. Regarding monographs, book chapters and edited collections, are there any other considerations that UKRI and the UK HE funding bodies need to take into account when considering the interplay between the implementation dates for the UKRI OA policy and the OA policy for the REF-after-REF 2021 OA?

Yes / No / Don’t know / No opinion.

If yes, please expand (2,650 characters maximum, approximately 400 words).

As mentioned in Q50, an implementation date that takes the signing of the contract as its marker is unsatisfactory – because of the delay it would create, as previously argued, but also for monitoring purposes. This problem is exacerbated when all books submitted to the REF are the subject of the policy.

The date of the signing of the contract is not a piece of information that is made publicly available. It is not searchable in metadata. It is all but impossible for UKRI to monitor and for people to use when searching for books and chapters that they might reasonably expect to be Open Access. The date of publication, by contrast, is a standard piece of metadata and commonly used in book or chapter searches. It is a much more practical and useful marker of in-scope works.

Q53. Do you have any views regarding funding levels, mechanisms and eligible costs to inform UKRI’s considerations about the provision of funding for OA monographs, book chapters and edited collections in-scope of its proposed policy?

Yes / No.

If yes, please expand (2,650 characters maximum, approximately 400 words).

We believe this policy should not simply funnel public money to pay Book Processing Charges for individual books. We have long argued that the BPC is an inequitable and unsustainable way to fund OA. It transforms a barrier to access into a barrier to participation and, if normalised, would restrict OA publication to the wealthy.

BPCs represent a price, not necessarily a cost. Our own activities demonstrate that it is possible to publish books that are available in multiple, high-quality OA editions from the date of publication, at a cost to us of around £5,000 a book, and without charging authors. Our biggest revenue stream to meet this cost is sales, despite the fact that we publish all our books simultaneously in OA editions. That significant income can be generated from the sale of OA books is also demonstrated by the research cited in Q40, and other presses have noted it too (e.g. see https://twitter.com/DrMammon/status/1179400555086716935).

We have published all our costs and revenues for the last financial year in a blog post [forthcoming: to be published prior to the 29 May deadline], along with a detailed breakdown of our business model, to demonstrate how other approaches than the BPC can be effective.

BPCs are a high price to achieve a limited outcome: one OA book per BPC. UKRI money would be much better invested developing systems and structures that render the BPC unnecessary. See e.g. COPIM, which is building open, community-governed infrastructures to bring down the costs of OA publishing and enable alternative funding streams. COPIM is also exploring alternative business models to support OA, and examining how to help non-OA publishers transition to OA. (For more on infrastructures, see Q54.)

Investments like this, which approach the dissemination of research as a complex ecosystem, rather than a series of fixed transactions, are a much more powerful and sustainable way to manage a major transition to Open Access.

If BPCs are to be paid out of UKRI funding, there should be transparency between publisher and funder about what the costs are, and why existing revenues cannot meet them. But in our view, UKRI should make clear to authors and publishers that UKRI is not prepared to support BPCs in the long term.

There might be a case for allocating funds to help authors cover the costs of reproducing third-party material, although see Q45, 46 and 47 for arguments about a better way UKRI could invest resources here.

Q54. To support the implementation of UKRI’s OA policy, are there any actions (including funding) that you think UKRI and/or other stakeholders should take to maintain and/or develop existing or new infrastructure services for OA monographs, book chapters and edited collections?

Yes / No / Don’t know / No opinion.

If yes, please state what these are and, where relevant, explain why UKRI should provide support (2,650 characters maximum, approximately 400 words).

UKRI should develop a platform where it can host and share the OA outputs it has funded.

The content will be in one place, not scattered across publishers’ websites or institutional repositories with varying standards of discoverability.
UKRI would thus support and enhance the discoverability of its OA research and showcase the work it has funded.
It should therefore be a condition of UKRI funding that UKRI has the right to host a copy of each funded work, and the publisher must allow UKRI to collect metadata sufficient for this purpose.

This is particularly important if a Green OA route for books is deemed to be in scope. Institutional repositories are not sufficient for the effective dissemination of OA works – a Green OA paper in a repository in Cambridge will not appear in a library catalogue in Leeds, and vice-versa. Tools such as Unpaywall can help people find OA versions of academic works, but readers should not be dependent on tools designed to mitigate an initial failure of discoverability.

A UKRI platform could host both Gold and Green OA outputs. It could ensure all its OA works have a DOI, and deliver metadata to (at least) all UK academic libraries (this is another area where COPIM is doing good work). Such a platform would also provide a repository for scholars who have left their institution, but are publishing work based on a UKRI-funded PhD.

One option is to host a UKRI collection on the non-profit platform OAPEN, as the Wellcome Trust has done. OAPEN can host OA books, record reliable usage metrics and deliver metadata.

There are a number of other organisations with whom UKRI might liaise to explore the development of infrastructure in fruitful ways, such as SCOSS and Invest in Open Infrastructure as well as initiatives like OPERAS-P. The COPIM project is a valuable source of expertise that UKRI could consult.

SCOSS aims to facilitate the security and sustainability of a global network of community-governed infrastructure projects, while Invest in Open Infrastructure is making the case for higher-education institutions to help support the systems that disseminate the research they produce, in ways other than paying publishers for content. These are organisations with which UKRI could forge relationships in order to support its OA strategy.

Q55. Are there any technical standards that UKRI should consider requiring and/or encouraging in its OA policy to facilitate access, discoverability and re use of OA monographs, book chapters and edited collections?

Yes / No / Don’t know / No opinion.

Please expand (2,000 characters maximum, approximately 300 words).

As previously argued, UKRI must make sure that it isn’t possible for an OA version of a book or chapter to be buried in a repository. There should be minimum standards of discovery and presentation:

metadata sufficient for readers to discover the work;
use of Crossref DOIs that point to the OA version;
a UKRI platform where funded OA works can be hosted (see Q54),
standards for display on publishers’ websites, including
- OA versions clearly marked and linked to on a publisher’s website (for Green as well as Gold OA),
- filters on publishers’ websites enabling a search for OA publications.

Full-text URLs for content mining should be encouraged.

UKRI should also be thinking long-term about supporting a move away from the PDF format. PDFs are difficult to search and reuse. They put digital content into the format of a printed book, when it could and should go beyond that. We believe that readers will always value printed works, and our business model depends in part on their sale, but we also do not believe that digital content should necessarily be formatted in the same way as a print book. We believe UKRI should be supporting the development of machine-readable, XML-based content (see for example the freely available, open source tools and workflow we have developed to enable other publishers to convert EPUB editions into XML files, as we do). This might not be something that can realistically be demanded in the short term, but UKRI should be actively investigating how it can be made possible in the future.

Q56. Do you have any other suggestions regarding UKRI’s proposed OA policy and/or supporting actions to facilitate access, discoverability and reuse of OA monographs, book chapters and edited collections?

Yes / No / Don’t know / No opinion.

Section C: Monitoring Compliance

Q57. Could the manual reporting process currently used for UKRI OA block grants be improved?

Yes / No / Don’t know / No opinion.

Q58. Except for those relating to OA block grant funding assurance, UKRI has in practice not yet applied sanctions for non-compliance with the RCUK Policy on Open Access.Should UKRI apply further sanctions and/or other measures to address non-compliance with its proposed OA policy?

Yes / No / Don’t know / No opinion.

Please explain your answer (2,000 characters maximum, approximately 300 words).

Withholding funding from the institution seems a reasonable measure if faced with repeated breaches of the policy, but UKRI should support institutions to equip their researchers with the tools to navigate the publishing landscape and successfully comply.

UKRI could also reward institutions. As mentioned in Q51, OA policies too often focus on compliance and sanctions at the expense of communicating the reasons why the policy is a good idea. Could an institution’s openness be assessed with the intention of rewarding good practice and celebrating high-quality, open work?

Throughout this response we have emphasised that, rather than allowing broad exemptions, UKRI should instead allow particular exceptions if reasonable, and monitor the extent of their use. We suggest these exceptions should be held in a publicly accessible database, so that anyone can see why this research is not made openly available. The use of exceptions should be monitored by UKRI, both to see if they continue to be necessary, and to consider whether they highlight particular areas of difficulty in complying with the OA policy that might be mitigated.

Q59. To what extent do you agree or disagree with the example proposed measures to address non-compliance with the proposed UKRI OA policy (see paragraph 119 of the consultation document)?

Strongly agree / Agree / Neither agree nor disagree / Disagree / Strongly disagree / Don’t know / No opinion.

Section D: Policy Implications and Supporting Actions

Q60. Do you foresee any benefits for you, your organisation or your community arising from UKRI’s proposed OA policy?

Yes / No / Don’t know / No opinion.

Please expand (2,650 characters maximum, approximately 400 words).

The most direct benefit to OBP, as an OA book publisher, would be if there were more authors looking to publish an Open Access book. More than this, however, we believe the UKRI OA policy could have significant benefits in helping to facilitate a cultural shift in academic book publishing in the UK.

The current incentives in terms of hiring and promotion in UK universities do not encourage the prioritisation of access when authors are making publishing decisions. The UKRI OA policy will make access a much higher priority for both academics and publishers, and there is an opportunity here to hugely strengthen access to research undertaken in the UK.

As a scholar-led publisher, we are also members of the research and teaching communities. More books openly available to read will benefit us all (see this recent IFLA interview with academic librarian Johanna Anderson about the barriers and expense involved in trying to arrange access to academic books during the COVID-19 crisis). The problem of access is particularly noticeable now that members of wealthy institutions in the Global North are unable to use their libraries, and it is multiplied globally many times over for people who never have access to such libraries. This policy will be a huge benefit to students and researchers at institutions without means, to independent scholars without easy access to academic libraries, to people with disabilities who struggle to access physical material, and to any reader who faces difficulties obtaining academic books.

More support for community-owned, open infrastructure for OA publishing will be a benefit for the publishing community as a whole. Projects such as COPIM will support an increase in capacity of OA book publishers (see Q66), creating a more diverse publishing landscape with greater capacity for equitably funded Open Access.

Ultimately, the open availability of more AHSS research will provide evidence of the necessity of these disciplines. An economic crisis is looming that will hurt universities particularly hard. We might see more AHSS courses threatened in the belief that these subjects are not economically worthwhile. But the reading figures for our books (see Q68) demonstrate that open AHSS research is read in great numbers all over the world. OA books could offer powerful evidence that research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences is necessary and worthy of support, and OA has the potential to create opportunities to build on that work in new ways.

Q61. Do you foresee UKRI’s proposed OA policy causing and/or contributing to any disadvantages or inequalities?

Yes / No / Don’t know / No opinion.

If yes, please expand, referencing specific policy elements and including any comments on how UKRI could address any issues identified (2,650 characters maximum, approximately 400 words).

As explained in Q42 and 53, we are concerned that this policy should not entrench the BPC model of funding OA books, which replaces a barrier to read with a barrier to publish, and thus creates a whole new set of inequalities. We believe this would narrow participation in scholarly publishing, and be a misallocation of funds that could be spent in more effective ways, as argued in Q42 and 53.

We are also concerned that this problem might be exacerbated by a poor-quality Green OA system being widely used as a cheap alternative for those researchers who can’t afford a BPC, or for those publishers who don’t wish to develop an OA programme. This would create a two-tier system for OA work, in which those who can’t afford to pay lose out. See Q41, 42, 54 and 55 for more on this, including ways to improve the quality and discoverability of Green OA work. Finally, as mentioned in Q34, UKRI-funded PhD students could be disadvantaged if they are expected to publish work based on their thesis via an OA route without support in doing so. We believe the creation of a UKRI platform for its funded work would be a solution to this.

We would also like to follow Prof. Martin Eve’s lead here and rebut a common (and we believe, faulty) argument about OA and disadvantages.

‘This policy will disadvantage ECRs and academics seeking promotion.’ This argument disingenuously implies that academics themselves are not in control of the systems of career development and promotion. Further, the proposed REF mandate for OA books will greatly increase the number of authors publishing in this way, making it less of a ‘risky’ proposition. We would also suggest that the career of a scholar like Prof. Eve is itself a counterpoint to the claim that OA publishing damages an academic’s prospects.
We also strongly echo Prof. Eve’s point that this argument about career prospects neglects the disadvantages that the present system confers on others, including people with disabilities – indeed all those whom we identified as potential beneficiaries of this OA policy in Q60.

Q62. Do you foresee any positive and/or negative implications of UKRI’s proposed OA policy for the research and innovation and scholarly communication sectors in low-and-middle-income countries?

Yes / No / Don’t know / No opinion.

If yes, please expand, referencing specific policy elements and including any comments on how UKRI could address any issues identified (2,650 characters maximum, approximately 400 words).

Here we would like to echo the response of our colleagues in COPIM.

Benefits: increased open access to HSS and book research for scholars and the general public.

Drawbacks: If funding is provided for scholars in the UK to publish in OA by paying for BPCs, this will create further inequalities in access to publishing for scholars in the so-called Global South. This is why we are arguing for further investment in open infrastructure for books, and for the promotion of non-BPC business models for OA books.

We also caution against framing OA in terms of mere benefits for low- and middle-income countries, rather than an opportunity to learn from them. It is vital to recognise that countries outside the Global North have much to teach us for their approaches to open access monographs (see the Radical Open Access Collective for examples of this, https://radicaloa.postdigitalcultures.org/), particularly as many of these are funded by public money. This means that the UKRI policy poses both an opportunity and a threat to low- and middle-income countries in how it could either widen the gap between our approaches to knowledge creation or allow us to learn from their innovation here. We would encourage UKRI to invite Global South monograph publishers to discuss how the policy framework can learn from their expertise.

Q63. Do you anticipate any barriers or challenges (not identified in previous answers) to you, your organisation or your community practising and/or supporting OA in line with UKRI’s proposed policy?

Yes / No / Don’t know / No opinion.

Q64. Are there any other supporting actions (not identified in previous answers) that you think UKRI could undertake to incentivise OA?

Yes / No / Don’t know / No opinion.

Q65. Do you foresee any other implications (not identified in previous answers) for you, your organisation or your community arising from UKRI’s proposed OA policy?

Yes / No / Don’t know / No opinion.

Section E: Further Comments

Q66. Do you have any further comments relating to UKRI’s proposed OA policy?

Yes / No.

If yes, please expand (2,650 characters maximum, approximately 400 words).

Here we would like to say a little more about the ‘scaling small’ model, which informs the thinking behind ScholarLed and COPIM (in which the ScholarLed presses, of which OBP is one, are key partners).

Despite the habitual focus on a small group of large legacy presses, there is huge diversity in the Arts and Humanities publishing landscape. Simon Tanner has noted that, for REF2014, 1,180 publishers were associated with the books submitted to Panel D (Arts and Humanities). Many of these were small and/or specialist presses, with the top ten publishers accounting for less than 50% of submissions.

We believe the scholarly ecosystem is best served by this diversity among publishers, producing a rich variety of books. The best way to ‘scale’ what OBP does is therefore not to grow bigger ourselves, but to facilitate OA publishing among multiple presses by developing the systems and infrastructures that will enable other publishers to produce Open Access books without needing to charge authors BPCs. In other words, we would be able to scale capacity while supporting smaller presses and projects, rather than relying on a small number of large organisations that can attempt to set the terms of scholarly publishing.

‘Scaling small’ has the potential to build capacity for OA book publishing in a significant way. The five not-for-profit, academic-led Open Access presses of ScholarLed (of which OBP is one) have between us published over 500 books, and expect to publish over 80 new titles in the coming year. Our collection is already the second-largest on OAPEN (see http://library.oapen.org/browse?type=collection).

We have been contacted by a number of small-to-medium-sized presses and publishing projects who are interested in ScholarLed and COPIM and how our work can help to develop and strengthen their own activities. What would the publishing landscape look like if, rather than 5 presses, ScholarLed was 25, 50, or 100 in number?

For more on ‘scaling small’, see Janneke Adema's presentation at the OpenAire 'Beyond APCs' workshop at the Hague on 5 April 2017, and ‘Bibliodiversity in Practice: Developing Community-Owned, Open Infrastructures to Unleash Open Access Publishing’ by Lucy Barnes and Rupert Gatti, ELPUB 2019 23rd edition of the International Conference on Electronic Publishing, Jun 2019, Marseille, France, www.doi.org/10.4000/proceedings.elpub.2019.21.

Q67. Do you have any further comments relating to commonality between UKRI’s proposed OA policy for outputs acknowledging UKRI funding and the OA policy for the REF-after-REF 2021?

Yes / No.

Q68. Do you have any further thoughts and/or case studies on costs and/or benefits of OA?

Yes / No.

If yes, please expand (2,650 characters maximum, approximately 400 words).

Our metrics API, which allows access to all our book usage data, is open and available for anyone to use. Here you can access the usage data for all of our books, and see the amount these books are being used and shared (with the caveat that what we can measure will be only a subset of their actual use). For information about how to do this, see: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/section/84/1

Please find a list of successful, fully open access scholar-led book presses that have provided transparent information about their business models and costing structures here (as provided by our COPIM colleagues in their response, and highlighted again here):

Martin Eve, ‘How much does it cost to run a small scholarly publisher?’ (2017), https://www.martineve.com/2017/02/13/how-much-does-it-cost-to-run-a-small-scholarly-publisher/

Rupert Gatti, ‘Introducing Some Data to the Open Access Debate: OBP’s Business Model’ (2015), https://blogs.openbookpublishers.com/introducing-some-data-to-the-open-access-debate-obps-business-model-part-one/

Gary Hall, ‘Open Humanities Press: Funding and Organisation’ (2015), http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2015/6/13/open-humanities-press-funding-and-organisation.html

Sebastian Nordhoff, ‘Calculating the costs of a community-driven publisher’ (2016), https://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/langsci-press/2016/04/18/calculating-the-costs-of-a-community-driven-publisher/

Sebastian Nordhoff, ‘What’s the cost of an open access book?’ (2015), https://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/langsci-press/2015/09/29/whats-the-cost-of-an-open-access-book

Open Book Publishers

OBP Spring Newsletter 2020

Welcome to our Spring newsletter!

Amid all the uncertainties surrounding the COVID19 pandemic, at Open Book Publishers we remain committed to making knowledge accessible and we are still working —albeit from our separate homes— to bring you the latest news and open access academic books. In this newsletter we have curated a list of blog posts on e-conferencing and open resources, a wealth of freely available new academic titles, and articles on our most recent publications, which we hope you find useful in a time when accessibility and open content is of prime importance! Below you will also find updates on the UKRI consultation and a fantastic interview with our most recent addition to the team, Agata Morka, who joins us as part of OPERAS-P and the COPIM project as European Co-ordinator for Open Access Books. Finally, our new set of MARC records is now available here.

Thank you so much for being part of our global community and we hope you and yours stay safe!

UKRI Consultation: We are working on our response to UKRI's Open Access policy consultation: the deadline is noon on 29 May. Please consider sending in your own response in support of Open Access books. We will be making our response public on our blog next week -- please use it to help compile your own response, if you wish.

Get to Know Us - An Interview with Agata Morka: Our new European Co-ordinator for Open Access Books, Agata Morka, holds a PhD in Architectural History from the University of Washington, where she completed her dissertation on contemporary French train stations. For the past nine years she has been working with OA books. She is responsible for coordinating efforts between two European projects focusing on OA monographs: the OPERAS-P and the COPIM projects. Click here to find out about her career, her new role and the most challenging aspects of her work.

Chat with us! We would like to invite anyone interested in Open Access book publishing to chat with our team. We are launching a series of drop-in sessions where anyone interested in the different aspects of our work can ask questions and share thoughts. The first session is for researchers interested in our submission and selection process: log on and chat with our director and commissioning editor Dr Alessandra Tosi about how to submit a book proposal, our peer review process, what we look for when selecting books for publication, and more. When: Monday 11th May at 5pm (UK time). How: click here to connect to our Zoom channel. If you are unable to attend this meeting but would like to know more, please feel free to contact Alessandra by email at any time.
NEW VLOG SERIES ON ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES:

We will soon be launching a fantastic new vlog series on one of our forthcoming titles, Living Earth Community: Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing edited by Sam Mickey, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim. In this new series, which will run from the 11th May to the 1st June, Mary Evelyn Tucker will take the reader on a journey through the book and explore why it matters. She will interview the contributors about the ideas behind the project, and tease out the key arguments in each chapter. Download the schedule here.
We have also released the first online panel discussion on one of our latest OA books Earth 2020: An Insider's Guide to a Rapidly Changing Planet. On Monday, May 4, at 12 p.m. EDT the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society at Dartmouth hosted an online panel discussions with four contributors of Earth 2020: An Insider's Guide to a Rapidly Changing Planet. This panel was co-moderated by Philippe Tortell, editor of the title and professor at the University of British Columbia and Elizabeth Wilson, director of the Irving Institute and professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College. In this panel the following authors participated:

Sally N. Aitken, University of British Columbia
Douglas G. MacMartin, Cornell University
Roland Geyer, University of California, Santa Barbara
U. Rashid Sumaila, University of British Columbia
You can now watch this online panel here.
COVID 19: Information, resources and author posts:
COVID19: Information and Resources from OBP: An update on our activities during the Coronavirus crisis, and a collection of freely available and downloadable resources that might be useful during this time.

Coronavirus, inequality and the ‘tipping point’: Mark O'Brien draws on the lessons from his book, Just Managing? What it Means for the Families of Austerity Britain to discuss the very different experiences of the Coronavirus emergency at either end of the UK’s social spectrum.

Vigilant audiences and stay-at-home justice: Author Daniel Trottier reflects on the roles of online vigilance and vigilantism during the Coronavirus pandemic.

Models in Microeconomic Theory - A Blog Post: Martin J. Osborne discusses the importance of writing OA textbooks, especially during periods of crisis, when the urgent need for accessible resources becomes obvious to all.

The End of the World: ten years later: Maria Manuel Lisboa reflects on her book, The End of the World: Apocalypse and its Aftermath in Western Culture ten years after its publication, and considers what it has to tell us today.

The World Dislocated: Author Ellyn Toscano draws on her book, Women and Migration, to consider the impact of Coronavirus on the plight of migrants huddled closely in detention centers, migrant camps and prisons.
A thank-you note to my publisher and readers: One year after its publication, R. H. Winnick, author of Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels reflects on the importance of modern technology and of OA publishing in keeping reading, learning, & scholarship alive during the current pandemic.

Open Books from OBP - A Showcase

A showcase of freely accessible academic books - from anthologies to philosophical tracts to books on film and quotation - all introduced by their authors.

The Environmental Impact of Open Book Publishers: At Open Book Publishers, we are working to minimise our environmental impact. Find out more in this post.

Open Education:

Is prestige a problem? Considering the usefulness of prestige in academic book publishing: A reliance on prestige in academic publishing limits the choice of authors and the accessibility of research, and it deadens innovation. What might we replace it with?

Why is open education resource creation, management and publishing important? Reflections for Open Book Publishers on Open Education Week 2020: Read our authors and contributors as they consider OER creation, management and publishing.

Publishing an Open Access Textbook on Environmental Sciences: Conservation Biology in Sub-Saharan Africa: Richard Primack and John Wilson discuss the idea behind their OER project and the importance of making this knowledge openly accessible.

Open education is key to the future of learning: Read Patrick Blessinger's blog on the importance of open education for human development and learning.

Econferences: why and how? A blog series

We are all having to learn how to do more remotely, now and for the foreseeable future. This series of blog posts, drawn from our forthcoming title Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene, deals with the why, the what, and the how of online conferences.

What do conferences do—and can econferences replace them? Why do we have academic conferences at all, and what are the affordances and constraints of online conferences in meeting these needs?

Are virtual conferences good enough? Socially constructed obstacles to virtual conference adoption are large, but fragile. Change will be driven by improvements in technology, increased networked literacy and pressure to restrain costs – both financial and ecological.

Time management and Continuous Partial Attention: The simultaneous focus on multiple technologies and social contexts in conferences settings creates opportunities as well as problems for researchers.

Successful econferences: examples and case studies: This post presents some examples and in-depth case studies of successful online conferences.

Authors' Posts:

Agency: Moral Identity and Free Will - A blog post: Read David Weissman's new blog on his book in which he discusses the concepts of determination, autonomy and choice.

In Gallucci's Commentary on Dürer’s 'Four Books on Human Proportion': Renaissance Proportion Theory, James Hutson explores the ideas and intention behind his new OA title.

The Classic Short Story, 1870-1925: Theory of a Genre: Read Florence Goyet's incisive introduction to her global study of the classic short story, including works by Maupassant, Chekhov, Verga, James and Akutagawa.

From Darkness to Light, Writers in Museums 1798-1898 presents essays that explore, for the first time, the reaction of writers and artists to museums and galleries that were not yet lit by electric light.

Tony Curtis, “The Young Juggler”: Jan M. Ziolkowski explores the connections between Hollywood star Tony Curtis and the fable of the Juggler of Notre Dame.

The Death of Tomie dePaola and the Juggler of Notre Dame: Jan Ziolkowski reflects on the life and work of American author and illustrator Tomie dePaola, particularly his affinity for the tale of the Juggler of Notre Dame.
Our books elsewhere:

Forgotten letters tell the inspiring story of a Suffolk pioneer by Andrew Clarke: Published in the East Anglian Daily Times, this article focuses on Lucy Pollard's new title Margery Spring Rice: Pioneer of Women’s Health in the Early Twentieth Century.

Earth Day 2020 — the 50th anniversary will be the weirdest Earth Day ever: A fantastic interview with CBC Quirks & Quarks where host Bob McDonald speaks with Philippe Tortell, author of Earth 2020: An Insider's Guide to a Rapidly Changing Planet, about his new book. The podcast features an excerpt from the Earth Symphony.

Earth Day at 50: A look to the past offers hope for the planet's future: Read Philippe Tortell's latest article for The Conversation Canada, in which he talks about the history of Earth Day and the actions that have been implemented since its first celebration in 1970.

Call for Papers:

Applied Theatre Praxis: This series focuses on Applied Theatre practitioner-researchers who use their rehearsal rooms as "labs”; spaces in which theories are generated and experimented with before being implemented in vulnerable contexts. Click here to find out more about the submission process.

St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture: This series covers the full span of historical themes relating to France: from political history, through military/naval, diplomatic, religious, social, financial, cultural and intellectual history, art and architectural history, to literary culture. Click here for more details.

Global Communications: Global Communications series looks beyond national borders to examine current transformations in public communication, journalism and media. We are currently accepting proposals for this series. Click here if you wish to know more.

New Publications: These past few months we have released fantastic new titles on the fields of environmental sciences, literary studies, philosophy, economics and art. The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, written by Geoffrey Khan, is the first title of our Cambridge Semitic Languages and Culture series. In this book, Professor Khan presents the current state of knowledge of the Tiberian pronunciation tradition of Biblical Hebrew and a full edition of one of the key medieval sources, Hidāyat al-Qāriʾ ‘The Guide for the Reader’, by ʾAbū al-Faraj Hārūn. You can read the first volume here and access the second volume here. March saw the publication of Gallucci's Commentary on Dürer’s 'Four Books on Human Proportion': Renaissance Proportion Theory by James Hutson and Models in Microeconomic Theory by Martin J. Osborne and Ariel Rubinstein. Finally, in April a wealth of new titles hit the press: Agency: Moral Identity and Free Will by David Weissman was published earlier this month, as well as the second volume of The Life and Letters of William Sharp and "Fiona Macleod". Volume 2: 1895-1899 by William F. Halloran which is now available to read and download here. On Earth Day we published Earth 2020: An Insider's Guide to a Rapidly Changing Planet, edited by Philippe Tortell. Written by world-leading thinkers on the front lines of global change research and policy, this multi-disciplinary collection maintains a dual focus: some essays investigate specific facets of the physical Earth system, while others explore the social, legal, and political dimensions shaping the human environmental footprint. Finally, on 24th April 2020, a date chosen to commemorate the second anniversary of the unveiling of Millicent Fawcett's statue in Parliament Square, we published a biography of her niece: Margery Spring Rice: Pioneer of Women’s Health in the Early Twentieth Century. This biography presents readers with the story of Margery Spring Rice, an instrumental figure in the movements of women’s health and family planning in the first half of the twentieth century. Spring Rice was born into a family of formidable female trailblazers – niece of physician and suffragist Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and of Millicent Fawcett, a leading suffragist and campaigner for equal rights for women, and she continued this legacy with her co-founding of the North Kensington birth control clinic in 1924, three years after Marie Stopes founded the first clinic in Britain. You can now read and download this title for free here.

Forthcoming publications: Do you want to know more about the interplay between nature and culture in the setting of our current age of ecological crisis? Or about the grammatical aspects of Rabinnic Hebrew? If so, click here to visit our forthcoming titles section and find out more about the upcoming titles on these and many other topics that will soon be available!

If there are any thoughts you would like to share with us about this newsletter or our work in general, please email laura@openbookpublishers.com or contact us on Twitter or Facebook.

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Hackers & Designers: OPEN CALL FOR DISTRIBUTED WORKSHOPS

Throughout the years Hackers & Designers have been exploring and imagining different network concepts and networked practices in many ways. Looking back at some of our activities dealing with ‘Network Imaginaries’ we are getting very excited about the upcoming Summer Academy!

Without rendering the current events as an opportunity we restructured our annual H&D Summer Academy into a distributed workshop program. In earlier editions we worked together with approximately 25 participants during 2 intensive weeks. While we promote the importance of physical encounters for community building, making friends and allies, having discussions and start new initiatives, we think its important to stay safe. Our proposal is to collaborate with smaller groups in different places in the world, help each other with developing and facilitating remote learning formats that will be presented and shared online, with a bigger group of participants. In one week in July we will be all hacking and designing in our own local communities or at home while being connected with the larger H&D network. H&D will support the different initiatives with resources and expertise, and by ensuring a learning infrastructure that is accessible and available to all participants.

We therefore invite creative practitioners whose interest lie in critically and practically engaging with technology, to join us in reflecting and reimagining distributed practices. Whether it be fashion designers, system administrators, or disobedient citizens—we invite the H&D community and the wider public to learn together about network technologies in experimental and hands-on ways. Under the overarching title ‘Network Imaginaries’ we will challenge and activate participants to use and push the boundaries of existing technology and programming platforms (webware, hardware, software), online/offline networks, high and low tech (internet, IPFS, darknet, peer2peer, blockchain, bot networks), and user experience, all in a practical manner—and while addressing the ethical implications of the proposed technologies and processes.

Are you a collective or a group of people interested in workshopping topics, technologies and practices revolving around ‘Network Imaginaries’? This call is for you!

How does the distributed HDSA work?

We will select 6 workshop initiatives.
You will have one month time to develop a ‘workshop script’ that is accessible for anyone to join. This could be a translation of an already existing workshop (developed for a physical space) or an entirely new workshop script developed for this exceptional circumstance. That means a clear outline of the workshop, a video tutorial if needed, or a well documented readme file, and a list of the necessary equipment.
We offer a fee of 500€ for each workshop development including 100€ of material costs.
The 6 scripts will be made available to all participants on the week of the summer academy July 20-25
Workshop facilitators should be available for occasional questions from participants during the workshop week July 20-25.
You will be welcome to also join any of the other proposed workshops during that week, either as a collective or individual!
Submit your proposal here before May 15

Or read more on our website!

The Summer Academy will take place July 20-25, 2020.

AN OPEN CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS WILL FOLLOW ON MAY 15, 2020!

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Out now: Frictie – Ethiek in tijden van dataïsme, Miriam Rasch

Verschenen op 6 mei 2020 bij De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, Frictie: Ethiek in tijden van dataïsme van Miriam Rasch, onderzoeker bij het Instituut voor Netwerkcultuur.

Dataïsme is het geloof dat alles te vertalen is in data. Data leggen de wereld vast en maken haar beheersbaar. Maar voor wie en met welk doel? De onderliggende aannames van het dataïsme staan zelden ter discussie. Is de mens echt als algoritme te begrijpen? Wat gebeurt er met de dingen die niet in data te vatten zijn? En waarom wordt de dataïstische toekomst voorgesteld als onvermijdelijk?

Tegenover het ideaal van een geautomatiseerde wereld stelt Miriam Rasch een herwaardering van frictie: niet alleen als manier om weerstand te bieden aan de eis van transparantie en constante communicatie, maar ook als het startpunt van ethische reflectie. Frictie opent de weg naar ‘de-automatisering’ als mogelijkheid om woorden en dingen weer als nieuw te laten schijnen. Hoe kunnen we in dataïstische tijden ons eigen verhaal blijven vertellen?

Lees het eerste deel van de inleiding bij Athenaeum.

Lees de recensie die op 6 mei verscheen in Trouw.

Bestel het boek bij je lokale boekhandel, zoals Van Gennep in Rotterdam (waar een aantal gesigneerde exemplaren te vinden is), Athenaeum in Amsterdam of Bijleveld in Utrecht.

Luister bovendien hier naar de bijbehorende Spotify-playlist en kijk hieronder naar een korte impressie van het boek:

Frictie: Ethiek in tijden van dataïsme by Miriam Rasch from Institute of Network Cultures on Vimeo.

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Selfies Under Quarantine: Students Report Back to Rome (Final Episode)

Episode 1 with introduction: https://networkcultures.org/blog/2020/04/09/selfies-under-quarantine/

Italian translation: https://not.neroeditions.com/selfie-dalla-quarantena/.

Episode 2: https://networkcultures.org/blog/2020/04/16/selfies-under-quarantine-episode-2/

Episode 3: https://networkcultures.org/blog/2020/04/23/selfies-under-quarantine-students-report-back-to-rome-episode-3/

Episode 4: https://networkcultures.org/blog/2020/05/01/selfies-under-quarantine-students-report-back-to-rome-episode-4/

Episode 5 (final episode): DIGITAL IS THE NEW ‘NORMAL’

In collaboration with Danielle, Shaina, Briana, Jackie, Marta, Gabriella, Sydney, Elena, Sophia and Natalia

As this is the ending week of our semester, we go for lighter readings:

Human Contact is Now a Luxury Good

I just called to say…the Phone Call is Back

Zoom Fatigue is Taxing the Brain

The week of May 4^th is ‘liberation’ week in Italy. After two months of heavily enforced lockdown, we can finally go out. We can walk around, go to parks, and a few other things. We can, at least, breathe some little more freedom. We can celebrate a break from the technology that has kept us connected yet has also enslaved us during this time.

I propose my students to read the ‘Zoom fatigue’ article as I want them to understand that their exhaustion, their feeling of being drained, is my own exhaustion, is everybody’s exhaustion.

(Zoom calls according to Saturday Night Live – via Jackie)

When Sophia writes: “I’ve noticed that, as things have transitioned to the virtual space, I have become significantly more anxious and maybe even stressed to communicate via facetime apps with my friends, family and classmates”, she is describing a feeling we have all felt.

We have all felt drained after sitting for hours in our apartments, working on our laptops, or maybe just doing nothing, scrolling down for hours.

Why is technology so tiring? What’s in it that sucks all our energy, leaving us worn-out and nothing but numb?

I think of David Cronenberg’s mind-blowing novel, Consumed, exploring the (self) consuming, cannibalistic dimension of technology quite literally and in a super gory style (that I love). Technology is already fused with our body and eating it up from the inside, whether we like it or not.

“Was the iPhone a malevolent protean organism, the stem-cell phone, mocking him who had cameras with real physical shutters whose sound you couldn’t turn off? Promising to replace every other device on earth with its shape-shifting self—garage door openers, solar timers, television remotes, car keys, guitar tuners, GPS modules, light meters, spirit levels, you name it?”

Technology consumes us, silently, with its apparent lightness, giving us the illusion of having no weight. The illusion of being transparent, fluctuating. It blinds us with the promise of eternal connection and, yet, as Jackie writes:

“The technology that continued to separate us even under the guise of connection has become another blockade between ourselves and the world. It really is hard to consider apps like Zoom and Facetime a means of remaining socially connected when technology is impairing our ability to read and conceive physical social cues. A video call with a friend sheer miles away ends up feeling like we are being pulled further apart …The very social circumstance many of us have built for ourselves is just being torn down again as the devices we’ve once used to desperately connect make us cringe as they are synonymous with work. I can’t even watch videos on my laptop without feeling as though I am still in school, even as I consciously know I am avoiding schoolwork. The entertaining function of my laptop is almost nonexistent no matter what the screen shows me”.

Maybe it’s because the lines are now more blurred than ever between work and leisure, between what we DO for a living and what we ARE in life. These devices trick us with the promise of a smooth, seamless transition from life into work, and the other way around. Reality is, though, that the condition of ‘smart working’, the condition by which we are stuck in our little acquariums from where sometimes we re-surface and visually manifest ourselves in a “brady bunch style”, is the ‘comfort’ zone where power wants to keep us confined.

Do we really want that? Do our bodies need that, crave for that?

“Video calls seemed an elegant solution to remote work”, the National Geographic article says, “but they wear on the psyche in complicated ways”. After reading about the effects that screen life generates on our brains, Shaina concludes: “We are not designed to multitask the way screen mediated communication requires. So if you find yourself feeling exhausted while doing nothing, you too may be a victim of Zoom fatigue.” And Sophia acknowledges: “mentally, I have felt so exhausted from the transition to online learning and I definitely feel a sense of defeat as a result – so, to hear that there are deeper reasons behind it, was relieving to me.”

Every time we use these platforms, we are drained ‘by design’. The more we go deeper into our screen life, the more we will be consumed and eaten up, in a weird process of self-cannibalism à la Cronenberg.

This is why I look with concern and distress at expressions such as ‘the new normal’, ‘the new normality’. Hardly a day goes by without receiving emails, newsletters, invitations to ‘webinars’ that dub this phase of our lives as the new normal (normality).

PHASE 2 BEGINS!
For many this phase may not mean much, but we still want to celebrate as we all start our
NEW NORMAL

(From a food delivery service)

This invitation to a ‘web live conference’ says “the dawn of a new normality’

And this one focuses on “Culture facing the ‘condition of normality’”

The operation of re-branding an emergency situation, such as the one we are currently in, as if it were an emerging order, a brand new ‘business as usual’, is deeply problematic and very concerning to me. In this ideological ‘new normal’ technology replaces the body as a clean, safe, sanitized space for so-called social (socially distanced) interactions. It suggests that people can still work and have fun from a distance, fusing and confusing labor and leisure, keeping us atomized while providing the illusion that we are all connected.

But there is no global village in ‘a brady bunch style’. No connection in connectivity. No possibility whatsoever for sociality in isolation, even if networked.

Social distancing strives to become the new black. We should oppose that, staunchly and fiercely, first at a language level. Becoming used to describe something that is physical distance as ‘social distancing’ and calling an emergency situation the ‘new normal’ bear the risk of reifying abstract concepts and making them part of our daily reality.

“Ideas and opinions are not spontaneously ‘born’ in each individual brain: they have had a centre of formation, or irradiation, of dissemination, of persuasion-a group of men, or a single individual even, which has developed them and presented them in the political form of current reality.”

Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks

I’VE JUST CALLED TO SAY…I LOVE YOU

In the desert of the physical where quarantine and our ever-increasing hyper-mediated life have relegated us, something vaguely reminiscent of our bodies, a little remainder of our organic existence is resurfacing and regaining attention. It’s our *voice*.

A year ago, I joked with my students when asking them to ‘separate’ from their networked devices for 24hrs as a part of our auto-ethnography ‘experiments’ for the class: “you can still use the phone as a phone”, I told them. “I mean, to make voice-calls”. They would stare at me in awe, their gazes betraying their inability to even conceive to perform an old-fashioned action such as dialing a number without even texting to check whether possible or not to bug someone out of the blue. How rude. How inappropriate. For them, Stevie Wonder singing “I’ve just called to say I love you, I’ve just called to say how much I care” in “just another ordinary day” was archeology of the past.

But now things might be changing a bit, the New York Times solemnly declares. Because of the quarantine, because of the craving for anything physical, even if as disembodied as a voice. Yet, still human. Still not ‘scripted’ or ‘rehearsed’ as a voice in a voice message. Still spontaneous and not orchestrated or studied in every single detail as a textual conversation.

Natalia speaks of “the glow of the other human being” that can be perceived from an old-fashioned phone call. “After a few seconds or browsing through the lost corners of my mind, I can recall at least a dozen of moments I remember from all of these 3-to-4-hours-long phone calls I shared with my highs chool friend each week for months, yet I can barely recall a similar amount of memories that would relate to texting with a single person”.

Gabriella adds: “ Every time I use my computer I feel that I have to check Moodle, when I wake up I feel I have to check my email, this shift to online learning has made me anxious every time I use one of my devices. I personally don’t enjoy facetime or zoom or any video chat application, I would rather talk on the phone or obviously physically face to face. I just feel lucky that I got to come back home, to Guatemala before everything exploded worldwide. If I was in Rome, alone in my apartment, I am pretty sure I would be calling people 24/7 and would be so eager to see them virtually face to face, but thank God that is not the case and we can stick to the old fashion way, phone calls”.

Conversely, Marta admits her phobia for voice calls: “I never call…. I really do stress my brain a lot because I hate talking on the phone. The only person I call is my mom… Talking on the phone gives me a lot of anxiety. The thing is that I grew up texting whereas the older generation only had the possibility to call. Now, there are so many ways to communicate and talking is only one of them. You can email, use whatssup, Instagram DM’s, Facebook chat, Twitter, Snapchat and much more. Most of the time, my best friend and I only communicate by sending each other random picture on Snapchat. That’s it. There is no text and no voice involved, yet we can perfectly communicate. In 2020 silent communication is possible and sometimes fast and fun, but it can also destroy relationships due to avoidable misunderstandings”.

Danielle talks about those misunderstandings that can be generated through text. “Texting can be dangerous. Loss of tone, keyboard courage, and ‘receipts’ as us milenials refer to proof. Through texting there have been plenty mishaps on my end. The countless amount of times I have screen-shotted a conversation between myself a someone fighting, trying to send it to another person and I by accident send it directly back to that person… awkward. That isn’t a factor with phone calls. Neither is keyboard courage. On text I will find myself typing up condescending texts at times, whereas in person I wouldn’t be as daring. Texting skips over our holistic selves for sure. It creates a new person”.

Shaina admits: “When my phone rings the first thought that comes to my mind is ‘Ugh!’ I, like many others, prefer texting over calling for communication. But I do not think it is the ideal form of communication. When texting you are unable to multitask the way you could if on a phone call. The other night I was making chicken for dinner and my friend kept texting me and every time, I would have to wash my hands and then answer so I didn’t get chicken juice all over my phone. It would have been much easier to just call her and put my phone on speaker and we could have communicated without interrupting my cooking every few minutes. The other part about texting that makes it less efficient than calling is response time is up to you. On a normal phone call the conversation is back and forth with no hesitation between responses. When texting, sometimes people can take hours to respond. This can be especially frustrating if you’re waiting on important information. In quarantine, I have been off my phone more than normal some days, trying to disconnect for a little. This caused problems between my boyfriend and I. Normally, we text each other when we have time in between class and work and whatever else we are doing. Now that we have nothing going on, there really is no excuse for why we can’t text 24/7. I started to feel that our conversations were getting boring. Every day the same thing. “What are you doing today?” “Nothing really, probably get some homework done, what about you?” “Same.” There is nothing new and exciting to talk about because there is nothing new and exciting happening right now with everyone being on lock down basically. I found it exhausting to drag these dry conversations out all day long. So I stopped answering as frequently. I didn’t think this was an issue because for me this had become my ‘quarantine normal’, to look at my phone maybe once an hour and respond to any notifications and then put it away again. But my boyfriend overthought the scenario and created false reasonings in his head of why I wasn’t answering him. One night, he came forward and expressed that he felt I didn’t want much to do with him anymore. He said by me not answering and talking to him all day long he felt unwanted. I felt horrible for making him feel that way. He thought that I was just ignoring him while I continued to text my other friends and be active on my phone. I explained to him that that wasn’t the case at all.

Texting leaves so much room for misunderstanding which can become extremely problematic for a relationship or even work related issues. When we text we lose such a huge part of communication as we know it. We no longer have a face to face interaction, we lack tone, mannerisms and expressions, all non verbal communication is eliminated. These are important factors for humans because we are naturally social creatures who rely on these aspects to fully understand a dialogue”.

(via Marta)

Sophia also gives her take on the matter: “I definitely agree that there are important social cues lost through messaging, but I also wanted to point out that with those people whom we are closest too, there are ways in which you might develop a sort of texting language with them. For example, my family is very close and we often message in a group chat when we are apart from each other. In this chat my mom and I are usually on the same page and know exactly what one another means because we know each other so well both in the physical world AND the messaging one. But often my dad and brother don’t understand the exchanges my mom and I share in the chat and I think that’s super interesting how out of a group of people so close, my mom tends to understand my texting language more than they do”.

Gabriella concludes with a smart remark on my own behavior when I send back comments to students.

“Professor Della Ratta tends to capitalize her comments on our reflections, and before understanding that she does it for them to be visible, I would take it personally. However, she also feels the need to clarify why she is doing it since many people can take it as yelling, or as something negative. This is an example of how most messages online can be misinterpreted. Not only I misunderstand my professor but imagine how I feel when my boyfriend writes something, and it sounds to me mean because it lacks an exclamation mark or it has no emojis, or he is using the wrong emoji, or why did he write a period, is he mad, did I do something to piss him off?? It is soooooo exhausting!!!!”.

Well, Gabriella, I hope that at least he does not use CAPS, or yellow highlighters when talking to you

TOUCH ME (NOT)

Speaking about disembodiment, and trying to give a name to her lurking anxieties, Briana writes: “What is it that I’m really missing? Every time I’m in bed, ready to go to sleep, for some reason I cannot relax enough to fall into Morpheus’ arms. I start playing with my hair, caressing my cheeks, tapping on my lips, delicately touching my eyelids, brushing my eyebrows; I hug my stuffed animals, rubbing their fur. And I fall asleep. You guessed: I am missing touch. Not whatever touch: the intimate, loving touch that only another human being can provide. Let me tell you, the fact that I caress myself is not only weird to read for you, it’s weird for me to do in the first place. It’s some sort of non-sexual-masturbation. The nurturing act of touching is necessary for the brain to learn to connect human contact with pleasure, and it sets the base for empathy.

(“Since everyone was exercising during quarantine, I decided to do the same. I wore my gym clothes and took pictures. And never exercised”)

What scares me most of all about COVID-19 is not the lack of freedom, but rather the fear of touch that will follow: physical contact, in fact, is the easiest way to get infected. Even though screens have made us feel closer to each other, helped us work online and keep track of time and what was happening in the world, their smooth, anonymous texture cannot replace the touch of another human. Screens can receive our tapping, scrolling, caressing, but they can’t give it back to us.

(“I edited my friends into my pictures to feel closer to them”)

I once read that if we want to have an empathetic culture, we have to learn how to touch and be touched: the thought that this virus might severely affect – and by affect I mean decrease – this kind of human contact, the kind of human contact that can make us empathetic and build strong relationships since birth, makes me sick”.

(via Briana)

Cronenberg is a master in describing a society where physical, organic life has already changed into something else, something tech. “That was life with Naomi”, the male protagonist of Consumed concludes, thinking about his lover. “Disembodied (…) No smells, no sights, no sounds. He had been in his phone, Naomi a voice in his brain. On his laptop”.

This hyper-reliance on tech seems to have become already part of our daily lives. Sydney describes something that could have been thought as a sci-fi like situation just a few years ago, but now happens ‘normally’ IRL.

“My sister lives in Virginia and she’s helping the robots around town!”, Sydney’s aunt told her and her family. “Our mouths were agape”, Sydney writes. “What robots are you talking about?”

Here is a link describing what is happening in my aunt’s sister’s hometown of fairfax, virginia. their delivery is now brought via robot. “that’s so cool!” my mom exclaimed. “it’s frightening,” was all i could manage. according to the article, ‘the robots are outfitted with multiple cameras, two-way audio, and can navigate hurdles like curbs.’

At this rate, traveling to the grocery store seems moot when there are robots that will do it for you. ordering and deciding which brand is the best for you also seems moot when there are even more roots that will do it for you. perhaps one day, food delivery will all be electronic. we once hunted and gathered. now we just gather, or rather, purchase. we are only one step away from getting rid of this method completely. there will be no human contact in stores…no cashier interaction, no saying hello to familiar people, and no longer contemplating which food to buy. Human contact will become even more of a luxury in this regard”.

Natalia also reflects on tech-mediated daily life. “Avoiding screens seems barely possible. As most of the world is becoming more and more dependent upon screen-mediated communication, it’s becoming the privilege of a few not to be online. If you’re not Facebook, you do not exist, unless your existence is *rich* enough to speak for itself, with no need for textualization and statistics of hyperlinks to acclaim your status. Avoiding the online is a possibility granted by social standing; it is a matter of having a choice or having no choice: being not able to afford to be online or being able to afford not to be online”.

Elena tries to see the glass as half full: “Human contact is now a luxury good: screens used to be for the elite. Now avoiding them is a status symbol.”

“Elite or not elite? Good or bad? I believe that considering digital devices either good or bad for us is limiting. On one hand digital devices make us waste time, enslave us, even make us less dependent on face-to-face communications and more “human” interactions …but saying that they ruin our life is also wrong. In fact, like wine, if “used with parsimony” they can make our life easier. With the spread of COVID-19 I realized it even more. Without my digital devices, I would not have been able to finish this semester, I would not have kept in touch with my friends, my parents would have had to stop working, I would not have seen all the memes about Salvini and Conte…It hurts only thinking about it. Jokes aside, like a knife can kill or heal, a hand can slap or caress, digital devices can either be a tool or a weapon. Too much use leads us to suffer from technostress*, too little use would lead us to loss.

Obviously, there is no way we can escape from this screen mediated life. The medium is the message, right? This only means that phones are infrastructural and therefore, whether we like it or not, we will forever need them (unless there is an apocalypse…hopefully not). Here comes my question: since we can’t get rid of them, why don’t we learn to appreciate them and use them to our advantage?”.

(Picture of me in pajamas, reconciled with my laptop)

(via Elena)

SO, WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

A couple of weeks ago, after reflecting on Eva Illouz’s chapter on net romance, Danielle wrote the following on our Moodle forum:

“This invoked a very broad question within me. I have thought of this question the entire semester with every single material we read and with every conversation we have, yet never wanted to ask because it seems stupid. But why does studying any of this matter? Why does it matter to all of these scholars, to us, to “expose” or view technology as capitalism. Is it to give us the power to be enlightened on what is “truly going on”? Going back to that original idea of a scholar we read whose name is slipping my mind currently, “even though we know what is happening we will do it anyway.” or something along those lines. After this class and during this class we have and will continue to utilize the internet, continue to create dating profiles, to like and share memes, to elevate our online personas.

Is it in effort to understand the world in which we currently live in? To grasp the current human status? Is it an effort to disgust us and get us to limit our use? I think of it and compare it to cigarettes. Smokers know all of the negative effects, the main one causing premature death, yet the addiction keeps the users using and nothing changes. Does knowledge shape action and habits…no, not when addiction is involved. I don’t think any amount of research or ideology will wean billions of people of an interface that is designed to be addicting. Maybe that isn’t the goal… but what is and does it differ from person to person. Although this may seem off topic. This broad question is really the heart and soul of the class- what are everyone’s opinions”.

WOW, I thought. How bright and smart is this young woman who writes such a honest thing challenging her professor and her peers (and even before final grades have been submitted). I saw this question surfacing many times, emerging silently in my students’ gazes. But never was it phrased in such a thought-provoking manner. I was hoping some of the others take advantage of Danielle’s question and say something (e.g. it matters for credit, no?!). Nobody did, though. Maybe for the reasons listed here by Jackie:

“I think a lot of us have had times where we asked ‘why the heck are we doing this’, but some existential things are better left unsaid and thus buried into our subconscious. Nonetheless, I am thrilled to think about it now”

(DISCLAIMER: I’ve re-proposed everyone to think about Danielle’s question as we approach the end of the semester)

“To frame my answer, I offer the scene in which the rest of us have not noticed nor actively responded to Danielles question. Why did we do that? Why don’t we actively read each others when work it’s so accessible to us now, and why don’t we respond with our thoughts immediately? If the internet meant to allow us to connect, why don’t we use it to do so? Studying our identities as formed by the intent is like Alice falling down the rabbit hole—but aren’t we all just so damn curious as to why Alice decided to stick her head too deep knowing no good would come of it?

The complexity of the human mind is something that we can only attempt to comprehend, but by separating it into these little things (ie adolescent behavior, abnormal psych, language acquisition, and of course our new networked identities) we are trudging forward to mapping what makes us human (and for the capitalists its also a step towards making the perfect apocalyptic artificial intelligence with such knowledge). I think searching for reasoning beyond this natural curiosity is futile and has the same impact as me asking why you took this class—so you were interested, okay, but about your interest made you stay unlike the group of our few and fleeting men that left after the first day of class? Why does studying our networked identities matter to you and your degree, and eventually your career?

Personally, though I am clearly a tech obsessed lunatic, I label myself as different than the mass of identities out there, but throughout the class I was able to use critical theory to understand why everyone, including myself, is the way they are. This knowledge certainly not useless as, beyond sheer understanding, I found it to be vital to developing a much needed empathy and considering what it really means to connect”.

(Thank you, Jackie, for mentioning the word “empathy”, something that it is much needed in our daily life as much as in critical theory).

Shaina says: “I am glad Danielle’s question was re-surfaced because this is something I have thought about as well during the course of this class. What is the point of learning anything?

Before this class, I have never taken any communications course and even the liberal arts courses I have taken are limited. My home base school is a research institution and I am a science major studying kinesiology. I learn mainly about how the body works and with that information I try to apply that knowledge to my own lifestyle habits to create a healthier me. I also enjoy sharing that knowledge with others to help them with their own bodies.

The first few weeks of this course, I thought the information was interesting but I did not really care much about it because it has nothing to do with my major or future career. I’ll be honest, I took it for credit. But, with all that we have learned, I have caught myself applying the information in a useful way. I would definitely say this class has changed the way I use apps. I have tried to eliminate the majority of my social media (but Instagram is something I can’t seem to let go of). I was tired of feeling consumed by my phone. This class has laid out why I am so addicted to my phone and social media. With this new understanding, I was able to pinpoint a lot of where my habits stem from. Some are by design of the apps, some are simply human psyche, but regardless I was able to find answers. This class has made a huge impact on how I now view the digital world.

I think that is the purpose of learning, to apply that knowledge to something greater than the classroom (or whatever setting it was learned), however that may be”.

Elena adds: “…that would allow us to find an equilibrium, the “just right”…this class gave me the opportunity to know better my physical and digital self, making me realize, as a result, that we should truly know our cyborg’s identity to make the best out of it”.

Sydney recalls Euripides’ quote “Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing”, and observes: “How sad that quote is, and it makes sense when you realize that Euripides is one of Greece’s most infamous tragedians. Isn’t this class a tragedy? It is all about taking away the veil of reality, the comfort of real life, and learning how awful the internet can really be and how it can negatively affect us. I don’t think we are necessarily answering something big here. Our professor has never given us a multiple choice question where only one answer is correct. Everything has been about expanding our view on what it means to be an internet user. We question everything we know. We have learned so many things (algorithms, theories, etc.), but we have never really answered huge questions. And I think that’s okay. Euripides didn’t answer anything, but his name is still remembered 2,500 years in the future because he was brave enough to challenge society and ask questions. That’s our job”.

Finally, Danielle goes back to her own question, writing about critical theory: “I think at first the idea pissed me off… why must we make everything about capitalism??? But after all of these classes, it was a lot cooler than I thought it would be. Something I would never come to on my own. The whole point of college for me was to have a pool of people that love thinking as much as I do, and I wouldn’t have made this comparison on my own”.

Natalia has made her own drawing of (how I call him) “Uncle Marx”.

I can only add something from another “critical theory” giant, Antonio Gramsci:

“The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned”.

(Gianluca Costantini – image via: gramscitorino.it)

But let’s not forget Neo and Morpheus, who deeply inspired this ‘red pill’ class.

PS.

HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY

As an ending note, Natalia writes about invisibility and disappearance. She made me think about this Radiohead’s song “How to disappear completely”.

I, we, wish that you disappear from the zone of discomfort and anxiety where you might have been in these past months, and reappear in a place of light and lightness.

“In a little while
I’ll be gone
The moment’s already passed
Yeah it’s gone”

Goodbye, for now, and see you in that lighter place!

From Natalia’s blog.

“A desire to become this thing—in this case an image—is the upshot of the struggle over representation. Senses and things, abstraction and excitement, speculation and power, desire and matter actually converge within images.”

—————————————– “In fact, it is a misunderstanding that cameras are tools of representation; they are at present tools of disappearance. The more people are represented the less is left of them in reality.”

~ Hito Steyerl

The Invisible …?

I’m the invisible man
I’m the invisible man
Incredible how you can
See right through me

When you hear a sound
That you just can’t place
Feel somethin’ move
That you just can’t trace
When something sits
On the end of your bed
Don’t turn around
When you hear me tread

I’m in your room
And I’m in your bed
And I’m in your life
And I’m in your head
Like the CIA
Or the FBI
You’ll never get close
Never take me alive

Now I’m on your track
And I’m in your mind
And I’m on your back
But don’t look behind
I’m your meanest thought
I’m your darkest fear
But I’ll never get caught
You can’t shake me, shake me dear

I’m the invisible man
It’s criminal how I can
See right through you

Look at me, look at me

Open Book Publishers

Get to Know Us: An Interview with Agata Morka

My name is Agata, I am an art historian and a culture manager by training: my focus, back in my Academia days, was modern and contemporary architecture and I have written a dissertation about contemporary French train stations, which I have defended at the University of Washington, in a very rainy city of Seattle. I have also completed a Masters degree in culture management in an even more rainy city of Lille, in northern France.

I am an avid reader and I love doing things with my hands: from knitting to window displays for a coffee shop at the corner of my street. I like summer storms, cheese and I feel best when there is an ocean, or a sea, or a lake somewhere close to where I live. I have moved a lot in my life, so I guess you can call me a bit of a nomad. For the past five years now though, my home has been Berlin, where I am privileged enough to live in a far too charming apartment on top floor of an Altbau. It is a good spot to look at the stars.

Could you give us a glimpse of how you first became involved with open access? What interests you the most about it?

After graduating in the States, I came back to Poland (where I am originally from), a bit tired of being a researcher, yet eager to still remain within the academic life, but perhaps in a different role than a professor. I was looking for something that would catch my attention and I saw a job ad from an academic publisher that was looking for a person to launch an open access books programme from scratch for them.
I have felt quite passionate about open access for quite a while back then: coming from an Eastern European university with an under-financed library I could only dream about accessing some of the publications I needed for my Master’s thesis. Later, when already in the States, taking advantage of interlibrary loans and library systems that seemed almost unbearably functional compared to what I knew from back home, the question of access to knowledge has become even closer to my heart. So the opportunity to work on a programme for academic books that would be made open for anyone with the internet access really started a fire inside of me. I applied for the job. By the time I was leaving de Gruyter after 4 years of working there, we had one of the biggest OA portfolio of all commercial publishers.
What interests me most about open access, to put it in very bombastic, yet at the same time very simple terms is the question of finding ways of making research equally available, no matter what the economic or geographical circumstances of the potential researcher/reader might be. It is important to me.

What drew you to work at COPIM and at OPERAS-P?

I think that now that OA has been around for quite some time, it is high time to make it blossom for books and think about alternative business models that would challenge the usual BPC-based models. We have already seen that this can be done, with funding schemes introduced by the Open Book Publishers or the Open Library of Humanities (for journals). People engaged in the COPIM and OPERAS-P projects are among the avant-grade of the movement towards different ways of thinking about making OA possible for books, especially in humanities, which is where my interests lie. COPIM and OPERAS-P are both very complex and difficult projects that require one to think wildly, to push the boundaries and imagine what could be. And you get to do it with colleagues who you admire. Who would say no to that?

Could you briefly describe what your role involves?

My role: the European Coordinator of Open Access Books Publishing evolves around reviewing what the current situation in the publishing, funding and library ecosystems is in Europe when it comes to OA books, identify where the challenges are and what we could do better, how we can work together to create alternative environment that would help OA books in humanities gain the momentum they deserve.

What do you think will be the most challenging aspects of your side of the project?

The hardest aspect will be to come up with alternative business models for OA books, and I am talking about models that actually work, that could be sustainable and potentially change the status quo of the gold OA dominance. I suppose that really tangibly changing the game will be the most difficult and, for this very difficulty, also the most exciting and hopefully rewarding part of the project.

INC

Coronavirus and Web 2.0: Philosophical Questions and Answers by Lorenza Saettone

A new INC essay, Coronavirus and Web 2.0: Philosophical Questions and Answers by Lorenza Saettone, now available, in Italian, here as pdf, and here as an e-pub file. Thanks a lot to Tommaso Campagna for the design and technical work.

Italian philosopher Lorenza Saettone and I started corresponding at the end of my ‘Sad by Design’ year, 2019. The collaboration became concrete soon after when Lorenza offered to write an essay about the role of philosophy concerning the internet in the lockdown months of 2020. Saettone majored in epistemology and cognitivism at the University of Genova. Her two BA ‘new media’ theses dealt with the formation of the identity online and offline and the philosophical novelties of Web 2.0. Her current master’s research, also in Genova, focuses on coding and robotics. She describes herself as a theorist and poet who aspires to become a high school teacher, investigating how technology can help teachers with their job. Students need media education. She believes the competences that Europe wants are all linked to digital literacy: learning languages to communicate, maths and science to write algorithms. And to gather a ‘metacognition’, to be able to develop an awareness of others, our own processes and the context—all aspects that are missing in the current educational programs.

In Coronavirus and Web 2.0: Philosophical Questions and Answers Lorenza Saettone talks about the inconsistencies of connections in a period of distancing and the tools with which to read ourselves and the reality around us. As we can read in the abstract, the lockdown measures call for separation such as the digital divide and the metaphysical division between virtual and real, a dualism that does not exist in practice. Art is also distancing in many ways: for example, it allows us to transcend borderline situations, but also to look at reality itself from a more distant, and therefore more lucid, point of view. Through a case study, the author analyses how culture also offers the possibility to approach people authentically, despite the restrictions. All these thanks to the web. Without the internet, how could we now realize our essence as human beings? The web allows us to work, communicate and mirror ourselves: on social networks we produce an infinite amount of selfie and narratives, i.e. biographies. But why do we post? Why are scientists uncertain? Why all the conspiracies? Are we ready to realize, in practice, what science fiction only hypothesized earlier in literary form? What are the risks and virtues of Big Data applied to the pandemic? How would the philosophers of the past guide us? How could art help?

The text we publish today, on May 6, 2020, of Lorenza Saettone is a full seize INC Network Notebook essay that embodies what philosophy in this age of the COVID-19 pandemic could look like, published in Italian, INC’s second language, awaiting translation. Those familiar with Latin languages can read it, for sure. Other too, as the condition described is, sadly, a universal one, and its poetry is there, for all to enjoy.

Below a short interview with Lorenza Saettone, in English, to give a context to the text.

Geert Lovink: Can you tell us something how this text came into being? Where did you write it? How did you experience the lockdown and quarantine? What’s the life of a writer without libraries, book stores, people to meet and discuss ideas? Should we praise the productivity that European romanticism (and its emphasis on solitude) so often seems to suggest? The fact was, most likely, that you were online, all the time.

Lorenza Saettone: I have to admit that my life has changed little. I used not to go out even before the arrival of the virus, avoiding restaurants, appetizers, cafés and business dinners. I’ve never loved the crowd, but at least now I can have a legal, and social justification for being non-social. Regarding solitude, there’s a poem written by Emily Dickinson that comes to mind entitled There is a Solitude of Space. She is the best witness of loneliness. Dickinson says that the only true solitude is the one when the soul is alone, in the presence of itself. Even Death is a social phenomenon in comparison to the loneliness of the self-reflection. The soul is sheepish when it is naked, looking at itself:

There is a solitude of space

A solitude of sea

A solitude of death, but these

Society shall be

Compared with that profounder site

That polar privacy

A soul admitted to itself –

Finite infinity

Indeed, the lockdown hasn’t made us automatically lonely. Actually, we have never been so busy. We have to escape the room, because, as Pascal said, we can’t be firm, deep-rooted, at a certain point, while we think to our Whys. When we are bored, it is more likely that we reflect on our misery (and mystery). This is why we escape, physically, or through our conscience, benefiting from each opportunity to distract ourselves. We escape the room, breaking its restrictions. To do that we invent every sort of reasons for not trusting experts. These reasons are invalidated by our interests.

In my view, the Internet is a wall that distances us from others. We can see people through it like we had the superpowers of Nembo Kid. The sight isn’t a participatory one, and, as far as we can spy through a keyhole, we remain outside, we can’t pass through it, and hug those that live on the other side, virtually. When, like at this moment, the web is added to the other material walls we are closed in, it becomes an opening. The wall isn’t only a ‘dividing peace line’, it is also a shared wall, one you can use to put up advertising posters, or ‘cave arts’ to testify your passage and to build together a tradition. In our rooms, the internet is the last chance, by which realizing the human Entelechia. For sure, the drifts and the side effects of improper use of the instrument are not minor. Conspiracy thinking and cynicism are widespread, and social networks create interest groups around these topics. The number of likes justifies their position.

Virtuality isn’t enough: this is proof that before this quarantine we didn’t live just online. Life was settled in the paradox of the interreality.

During the lockdown, I spent my time ‘poking the old mare’, as Socrates taught us. When it comes to writing I comment and post online. My essay is one of those dialogues. I strongly believe that philosophers must exit their ‘philosophical store’, and start to engage in the real job. Art and philosophy are on the Wittgenstein’s staircase, that’s true, but they are on watch!

I am concerned about the fate of artists. In fact, I don’t know how much longer they are prevented from organizing concerts and performances. To help them, I proposed, already in February, to plan live concerts using Twitch. Donations would have been a virtual hat for sustaining such a project—and our healthcare system at large. My idea has been converted into a Facebook Group with thousands of followers (called Quarantena Tour). Our streaming events, where we share art and high-level debates, are proof that platforms can support the construction of a community of people, linked by their entire Being.

GL: Your text seems to struggle with the extraordinary gap in Italy between theoretical sophistication and the dirty reality of a country that struggles with institutional collapse, incompetence, family dependencies, corruption and bureaucracy. The same contradiction was noted early on between the supposedly high level of Italian health care and the overwhelming amounts of death. Your reflections on digitalization are in sharp contrast with the ‘digital divide’ that has become visible now that everyone and every institution had to switch to online, overnight. Is this a specific Italian problem?

LS: Italy was unlucky to have been the first to manage an unknown virus. People experienced the uncertainty and falsifiability of science, up to the point that they thought these were merely philosophical speculations. Incoherence among virologists has caused political confusion about what measures had to be applied. Italian corruption has not betrayed our expectations. Again, it has given us the proof of what is the major Italian evil, but this time it is not the fault of the South. This mafia is in Lombardy, and it hasn’t got the lupara, the sawed-off shotgun.

I must confess that, aside from initial mistakes incoherence and the lowdown caused by an infinite bureaucracy and by business interference in managing the public healthcare system, Italian people demonstrated with facts to have run the first phase very well, and now lovers can finally come together. The lockdown could have been easier if we had invested more in digital literacy. The E-learning and the smart working would have been less traumatic if we had developed a right digital literacy among the broad population—not limited on being able to post a short video where we lip-sync on Tik-Tok.

GL: There is no English translation (yet). What is your text proposing? Which role can philosophy play? When we look at Agamben, Žižek and others, the ‘philosophy of technology’ is rather absent in the of the first three months of the Corona crisis. Needless to say that all writers, intellectuals and researchers have been intensely using the internet. What do you propose to integrate thinking and the digital? And how do see the role of pre-digital thinkers? Are they merely there to bring salvation?

LS: I have chosen to write the essay in Italian, my mother language. As a philosopher, I needed to dig deeply into questions and answers with my most familiar tool. I will translate the essay in English because it is fair to overpass linguistic borders (damned collapse of Babel!), to be a guide for more people, in particular now that this situation is a pandemic emergency, a global one.

With regards to the role of thinkers dealing with technical issues, we should remember that there is no such thing as a neutral point of view. Perspectives are conditioned by the observer’s conceptual framework. As Albert Einstein said, there is a necessary and fruitful collaboration between philosophy and science. When he examined the world, he employed a certain kind of reasoning, which was a mixture of art, philosophy, religion, ethics. Technology needs philosophers. It must be led, recounted, hence it must be introduced into the social grid. It can’t be accepted without an idea of humanity. This is what leads to the construction of code, apps and devices. Only a founding discipline like philosophy can offer a concept of what men and women are. Ethics is essential for justifying each research. We understand this point now more than ever because we are truly experiencing what risks may involve researches that deal with a virus that can extinct our species.

We cannot exit philosophy. Each justification why we should avoid to philosophize is in itself practising philosophy. Again, we can’t go off-topic when we are doing philosophy, because everything is its object, also what’s supposed to be ‘off-topic’. This is why philosophy can’t save us. It is the slavery of not being able to be slaves: hence it represents the paradox of the Freedom – recently the freedom is too often invoked, and without a vademecum about it.

Janneke Adema

CNKI free services during COVID-19 and OA long-term practice

Abstract

Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), initiated in 1999 by Tsinghua University and Tsinghua Tongfang Co., Ltd., is both the largest institutional repository in China and a near-monopoly provider of for-pay academic databases with a higher profit margin than Elsevier or Wiley, among other services. With promotion and support from the government, CNKI keeps developing its track towards open access [1]. CNKI offers free access to millions of documents ranging from dissertations and academic articles to popular and party journals. The COAA, Chinese Open Access Aggregator, launched in 2019, makes available more than 10,000 open access journals, although foreign scholars may find it difficult to benefit from this due to the language. CNKI has played an important role in making works on COVID-19 freely available, as well as in expanding access to subscribers at home during lock-down.

Details

CNKI stands for Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure, it was initiated by Tsinghua University and Tsinghua Tongfang Co., Ltd. and was founded in June 1999. According to Tongfang ’s annual report, the company officially opened the world ’s largest Chinese knowledge portal ‘CNKI (cnki.net) database’ in 2004, informally known as ‘Zhiwang’. CNKI is currently China’s largest integrator of academic electronic resources, including more than 95% of officially published Chinese academic resources.

At the end of 2017, CNKI had more than 20,000 institutional users, more than 20 million individual registered users, full-text downloads amounted to 2 billion pages per year and more than 150,000 online users. The market share of CNKI in Chinese undergraduate colleges is 100%. [2]

As most students know, the best way to access databases outside school is VPN. However, in some inconvenient situations like during the COVID-19 lockdown time in China, you cannot use VPN in some places. Some major Chinese database vendors provided recent limited-time free services. According to the Central China Normal University Library announcement, during the COVID-19 epidemic period (the service period is tentatively from February 1 to March 3, 2020), CNKI provides 4 free services including CNKI database literature acquisition, research learning, and collaborative scientific research services (CNKI OKMS platform). (English translation by the author) At the same time, the school’s students are offered a new online entrance to access CNKI database.[3]

For Chinese readers, CNKI developed a special database online platform to release and promote the latest COVID-19 related study results. You can notice the platform name in red font on the homepage. The platform includes 2,256 journals in total, including 23 non-Chinese journals.[4]

Source: print screen from https://cnki.net/

At the same time, CNKI announced that there is free access given by the CNKI OKMS platform, helping uninterrupted research team communication during the special times. The “OKMS Huizhi” is an Office Software for Collaborative Research.

Ms. Dai also stresses that the “OKMS Huizhi” platform was launched in May 2019, and it is now free because of the COVID-19 epidemic situation so that everyone can research from home. Before June 1, the “OKMS Huizhi” platform will be open for free. (English translation by the author) [5]

Besides the limited free access due to the COVID-19 pandemic period, CNKI started to open a variety of continuous services, for example, full-text open access to some Chinese published literature.

The target of this service is the whole country of China, which started in November 2015. The types of documents served include academic journals, conference papers, doctoral dissertations, master’s theses, and newspapers.

The free service scope of 2020 is all documents published by CNKI in 2011 and before, including 40.89 million articles published in 11,402 journals from 1911 to 2011, accounting for about 59.8% of all documents. These include academic journals; culture, art, and other popular journals; party construction, political newspapers, and other party and government journals; higher education, vocational education, and other educational journals; economic information journals. From 2000-2011 CNKI published 188,000 doctoral dissertations, 1.51 million ancillary papers, 4.17 million conference papers, accounting for 45.6%, 38.1%, and 67.4% respectively, as well as, 18.15 million articles from more than 400 newspapers from 2001 to 2019, totaling 64,908 million articles. (English translation by the author) [6]

For Chinese authors, there is a free service that started in September 2019, aiming at the authors who have Chinese publications collected in CNKI database. On this online free author service platform, authors can download own published documents for free, manage academic achievements, obtain academic evaluation reports, track academic frontier developments, and achieve online journal submission.[7] For English readers, CNKI keeps updating its oversea website. At the time this blog post is written, the open-access (OA) online-first publishing of COVID-19 platform is officially online to serve [http://new.oversea.cnki.net/index/] which includes 2,288 China journals and 25 foreign journals.

Source: print screen from http://new.oversea.cnki.net/index/

Source: print screen from http://en.gzbd.cnki.net/GZBT/brief/Default.aspx

What is more, CNKI Open Access Aggregator (COAA) is introduced to foreign scholars. CNKI Open Access Aggregator, COAA in short, was launched in 2019 and currently has more than 10,000 open access journals covering all fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and humanities.

According to the COAA platform introduction on their webpage, it will continue to expand the coverage of open resources from now on, increase open access books, papers, conference papers, etc., to provide users with a large number of open access resources. The journal covers 100 countries and regions on five continents, covering 100 disciplines and covering 70 languages. (English translation by the author) [8] Unfortunately, the homepage and all the instructions are in Chinese. The language barrier could be a difficulty for non-Chinese scholars.

Besides all the effort CNKI has made to develop open-access (OA), there are many challenges it is facing. One survey of Chinese readers conducted by Wen revealed the fact that 94.5 percent of the respondents were ignorant of the existence of OA journals.[9] As we mentioned before, the market share of CNKI in Chinese undergraduate colleges is 100% which keeps CNKI the Chinese world of academic publishing in a monopolistic stranglehold. According to Wang Yiwei’s article on July 24, 2019, CNKI has posted an average annual profit margin of nearly 60%in the past decade which almost doubled the figure of Wiley [10].

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1004345/publish-or-perish-how-chinas-elsevier-made-its-fortune

At the end of 2018, the Taiyuan University of Technology, a university located in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, China, put a notice regarding the suspension of access to “CNKI” in 2019 on their school website[11] and the next day the school library published that the budget for the usage contract with CNKI was 588,000 yuan (about $85,500). [12]

The cancellation due to high fees happens around the world. For example, SUNY (State University of New York System) subscribed to approximately 250 titles in Elsevier instead of the whole database in 2020 and this approach will save SUNY institutions $7 million annually. [13]

CNKI, which has been developed with the strong support of the government, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and other departments, could assume more social responsibilities through open-access (OA) instead of taking advantage of its leading enterprises to gain more economic benefits. As the quick development of online services is being promoted by the national government during the COVID-19 pandemic period, it is believed that open-access (OA) is to become the future of academic library exchanges in China.

References:

[1] Zhong, Jing, and Shuyong Jiang. 2016. “Institutional Repositories in Chinese Open Access Development: Status, Progress, and Challenges.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 42 (6): 739–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2016.06.015.

[2] 谭捷,张李义 & 饶丽君. (2010).中文学术期刊数据库的比较研究. 图书情报知识(04),4-13. doi:10.13366/j.dik.2010.04.015. https://kns8.cnki.net/KCMS/detail/detail.aspx?dbcode=CJFD&dbname=CJFD2010&filename=TSQC201004005&v=MDAwNDFyQ1VSN3FmWStSbUZpL2tVcjNOTVQ3YWJiRzRIOUhNcTQ5RllZUjhlWDFMdXhZUzdEaDFUM3FUcldNMUY=

[3] Central China Normal University Library Announcement (2020). 疫情期间限时免费数据库使用攻略. http://lib.ccnu.edu.cn/info/1071/4595.htm

[4] CNKI 2.0 homepage. https://kns8.cnki.net/nindex/

[5] 本王整理(2020-02-04). 刚刚！中国知网道歉了，并对免费服务项目做出说明. http://www.ecorr.org/news/industry/2020-02-04/176080.html

[6]《中国学术期刊（光盘版）》电子杂志社有限公司(2020-02-01). 关于中国知网免费服务项目的说明. https://piccache.cnki.net/index/images2009/other/2020/freeservice.html

[7] open-access author service platform. https://expert.cnki.net/Register/AuthorPlat

[8] COAA platform introduction (2019). http://coaa.discovery.cnki.net/public/about

[9] Wen (2008) citation: as cited in Hu (2012).Hu, Dehau. 2012. “The Availability of Open Access Journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences in China.” Journal of Information Science 38 (1): 64–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551511428919.

[10] Wang Yiwei(2020-06-24). Publish or Perish: How China’s Elsevier Made its Fortune. https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1004345/publish-or-perish-how-chinas-elsevier-made-its-fortune

[11] Zhang shumei (2018-12-28). Notice on suspending access to “CNKI series database” in 2019 http://www2017.tyut.edu.cn/info/1026/11127.htm

[12] Tendering and Procurement Center (2018-12-29). 2019 Electronic Periodical Database Renewal Service Project Transaction Announcement http://cgzb.tyut.edu.cn/info/1076/3542.htm

[13] Big Deal Cancellation Tracking. https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-cancellation-tracking/

Cite as: Shi, A. (2020). [ CNKI free services during COVID-19 and OA long-term practice ]. Sustaining the Knowledge Commons. [https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2020/05/05/cnki-free-services-during-covid-19-and-oa-long-term-practice/].

Section B: Monographs, Book Chapters and Edited Collections

Q33. To what extent do you agree or disagree that the types of monograph, book chapter and edited collection defined as in-scope and out-of-scope of UKRI’s proposed OA policy (see paragraphs 96-98 of the consultation document) are clear?

Q34. Should the following outputs be in-scope of UKRI’s OA policy when based on UKRI-funded doctoral research?

Q35. To what extent do you agree or disagree that UKRI’s OA policy should include an exception for in-scope monographs, book chapters and edited collections where the only suitable publisher in the field does not have an OA programme?

Q36. Are there any other considerations that the UK HE funding bodies should take into account when defining academic monographs, book chapters and edited collections in-scope of the OA policy for the REF-after-REF 2021?

Q37. Regarding monographs in-scope of UKRI’s proposed OA policy, which statement best reflects your view on the maximum embargo requirement of 12 months?

Q38. Regarding book chapters in-scope of UKRI’s proposed OA policy, which statement best reflects your view on the maximum embargo requirement of 12 months?

Q39. Regarding edited collections in-scope of UKRI’s proposed OA policy, which statement best reflects your view on the maximum embargo requirement of 12 months?

Q40. Do you have any specific views and/or evidence regarding different funding implications of publishing monographs, book chapters or edited collections with no embargo, a 12-month embargo or any longer embargo period?

Q41. To what extent do you agree that self-archiving the post-peer-review author’s accepted manuscript should meet the policy requirement?

Q42. Regarding monographs, book chapters and edited collections, are there any additional considerations relating to OA routes, deposit requirements and delayed OA that the UK HE funding bodies should take into account when developing the OA policy for the REF-after-REF 2021?

Q43. To what extent do you agree or disagree with CC BY-ND being the minimum licensing requirement for monographs, book chapters and edited collections in-scope of UKRI’s proposed OA policy?

Q44. To what extent do you agree or disagree that UKRI’s OA policy should include an exception for in-scope monographs, book chapters and edited collections requiring significant reuse of third-party materials?

Q45. To what extent do you agree or disagree that if an image (or other material) were not available for reuse and no other image were suitable, it would be appropriate to redact the image (or material), with a short description and a link to the original?

Q46. Do you have a view on how UKRI should define ‘significant use of third-party materials’ if it includes a relevant exception in its policy?

Q47. Do you have any other comments relating to licensing requirements and/or the use of third-party materials, in relation to UKRI’s proposed OA policy for academic monographs, book chapters and edited collections?

Q48. Regarding monographs, book chapters and edited collections, are there any additional considerations relating to licensing requirements and/or third-party materials that you think that the UK HE funding bodies should take into account when developing the OA policy for the REF-after-REF 2021?

Q49. Which statement best reflects your views on whether UKRI’s OA policy should require copyright and/or rights retention for in-scope monographs, book chapters and edited collections?

Q50. Regarding the timing of implementation of UKRI’s OA policy for monographs, book chapters and edited collections, which statement best reflects your view?

Q51. In order to support authors and institutions with policy implementation UKRI will consider whether advice and guidance can be provided. Do you have suggestions regarding the type of advice and guidance that might be helpful?

Q53. Do you have any views regarding funding levels, mechanisms and eligible costs to inform UKRI’s considerations about the provision of funding for OA monographs, book chapters and edited collections in-scope of its proposed policy?

Q54. To support the implementation of UKRI’s OA policy, are there any actions (including funding) that you think UKRI and/or other stakeholders should take to maintain and/or develop existing or new infrastructure services for OA monographs, book chapters and edited collections?

Q55. Are there any technical standards that UKRI should consider requiring and/or encouraging in its OA policy to facilitate access, discoverability and re use of OA monographs, book chapters and edited collections?

Q56. Do you have any other suggestions regarding UKRI’s proposed OA policy and/or supporting actions to facilitate access, discoverability and reuse of OA monographs, book chapters and edited collections?

Section C: Monitoring Compliance

Q57. Could the manual reporting process currently used for UKRI OA block grants be improved?

Q58. Except for those relating to OA block grant funding assurance, UKRI has in practice not yet applied sanctions for non-compliance with the RCUK Policy on Open Access.Should UKRI apply further sanctions and/or other measures to address non-compliance with its proposed OA policy?

Q59. To what extent do you agree or disagree with the example proposed measures to address non-compliance with the proposed UKRI OA policy (see paragraph 119 of the consultation document)?

Section D: Policy Implications and Supporting Actions

Q60. Do you foresee any benefits for you, your organisation or your community arising from UKRI’s proposed OA policy?

Q61. Do you foresee UKRI’s proposed OA policy causing and/or contributing to any disadvantages or inequalities?

Q62. Do you foresee any positive and/or negative implications of UKRI’s proposed OA policy for the research and innovation and scholarly communication sectors in low-and-middle-income countries?

Q63. Do you anticipate any barriers or challenges (not identified in previous answers) to you, your organisation or your community practising and/or supporting OA in line with UKRI’s proposed policy?

Q64. Are there any other supporting actions (not identified in previous answers) that you think UKRI could undertake to incentivise OA?

Q65. Do you foresee any other implications (not identified in previous answers) for you, your organisation or your community arising from UKRI’s proposed OA policy?

Section E: Further Comments

Q66. Do you have any further comments relating to UKRI’s proposed OA policy?

Q67. Do you have any further comments relating to commonality between UKRI’s proposed OA policy for outputs acknowledging UKRI funding and the OA policy for the REF-after-REF 2021?

Q68. Do you have any further thoughts and/or case studies on costs and/or benefits of OA?

PHASE 2 BEGINS! For many this phase may not mean much, but we still want to celebrate as we all start our NEW NORMAL

The Invisible …?

I’m the invisible man I’m the invisible man Incredible how you can See right through me

When you hear a sound That you just can’t place Feel somethin’ move That you just can’t trace When something sits On the end of your bed Don’t turn around When you hear me tread

I’m in your room And I’m in your bed And I’m in your life And I’m in your head Like the CIA Or the FBI You’ll never get close Never take me alive

Now I’m on your track And I’m in your mind And I’m on your back But don’t look behind I’m your meanest thought I’m your darkest fear But I’ll never get caught You can’t shake me, shake me dear

I’m the invisible man It’s criminal how I can See right through you

Look at me, look at me

Abstract

Details

References:

PHASE 2 BEGINS!
For many this phase may not mean much, but we still want to celebrate as we all start our
NEW NORMAL

I’m the invisible man
I’m the invisible man
Incredible how you can
See right through me

When you hear a sound
That you just can’t place
Feel somethin’ move
That you just can’t trace
When something sits
On the end of your bed
Don’t turn around
When you hear me tread

I’m in your room
And I’m in your bed
And I’m in your life
And I’m in your head
Like the CIA
Or the FBI
You’ll never get close
Never take me alive

Now I’m on your track
And I’m in your mind
And I’m on your back
But don’t look behind
I’m your meanest thought
I’m your darkest fear
But I’ll never get caught
You can’t shake me, shake me dear

I’m the invisible man
It’s criminal how I can
See right through you