I’ve identified a little gap in my support of open access publishing that I hope to remedy with this new practice. When I encounter a news article about a new study or paper, the first thing I do is look for the underlying paper. (It’s a good idea anyway, given the standard complaints about science journalism.) If the underlying paper is not available for at least public access, I’m not going to talk about it. As my friend Tom put it, “It’s not published until it’s open access. I’ll talk about it once it’s published.”
I don’t know how much of an effect this can have, but I know that it stems from a real problem. Academics don’t choose to publish in traditional, closed access journals because they offer any better deal; rather, it’s a career booster. A publication in a “top” journal comes with prestige, which is major currency to researchers trying to make a name. As a result, in Harvard Library’s memo encouraging open access, for example, the Faculty Advisory Council cites a need to “move prestige” to open access publications.
The hope, with my new policy, is that academics who want more members of the public to read about their results might choose a publication option that people haven’t pledged not to share, and maybe journalists will know that covering closed access papers results in less social engagement. It’s a long shot, but it’s something I can do.
When in the course of things that happen to humans one group of people needs to break away from being under the power of another group of people, and to take a full place next to all the other groups of people with power because the whole world and the big guy in the sky know they should have their own full place, they still have to explain to all the other groups of people why they want their own full place so bad.
It’s amazing how few words 1000 is. Lots of words I expect to be able to use (like country!) are unavailable. Still, I think this more or less gets the point across. But the absolute peak of the art form is Sherwin Siy’s take on “Ozymandias.”
In the early 90s, the musician Prince dropped his name and started going by an unpronounceable symbol. He called it “The Love Symbol,” and it’s a combination of the traditional male (♂) and female (♀) symbols.
Apparently (at least according to Wikipedia) Warner Bros had to send out floppy disks with a custom font to the music press they hoped would review his record. As a side note, this would be one of my all-time favorite collectibles. A purple (and you know it’d be purple) floppy disk with the Prince font? So great.
Anyway, so the Prince symbol is not eligible for inclusion in Unicode, which “does not encode personal characters, nor does it encode logos.” Still, though, the Unicode geeks on mailing lists have talked about it, charmingly using the shorthand TAFKAP (for The Artist Formerly Known As Prince). In one 1999 thread, a guy named Marco Cimarosti (personal homepage, in Italian, last updated 2006) proposed a canonical encoding of the glyph, using these combining characters:
01AC LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T WITH HOOK
030A COMBINING RING ABOVE
0335 COMBINING SHORT STROKE OVERLAY
032C COMBINING CARON BELOW
The end result, which will only work if you’re viewing this page in UTF-8 and have proper font support1 is Ƭ̵̬̊. Rendered large, that’s: Ƭ̵̬̊
It’s not perfect, and it isn’t very simple to type, but it beats writing out The Artist Formerly Known As Prince each time.
If you don’t have the right font, I can recommend Symbola↩
I never know when the things I’m interested in around copyright policy have general appeal, and I definitely thought this vague joke — on the occasion of the 29th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Sony v. Universal (the Betamax case) — was a bit obscure.
29 years ago today, the Supreme Court ruled Betamax legal. As the studios predicted, it crushed the budding American film industry forever.
I’ve just completed the wrap-up of the first week of Iron Blogger SF, year two, and man am I excited this time around. By almost every measure, Iron Blogger SF has been a success for me: I’ve written many more posts, been much happier with the way my writing has developed, and as a side benefit have gotten much more traffic than I ever have before. (It’s small numbers, as ever, but the graph is up and to the right, so who can complain.)
In case you don’t know how Iron Blogger works: if you’re participating, you commit to posting a blog post each week. If you succeed, great, and the other Iron Bloggers are a built-in group of readers. If you go a week without posting, you put $5 into a pot, and eventually we use the pot to fund a get-together with some drinks. It’s fun.
After a year, I’m really starting to feel some ownership of the program, and starting to think about ways we can tweak it to better serve our particular group and to help diversify the pool of bloggers. I think everybody is better off if the collection of blog posts each week cover a bunch of different topics from as many different perspectives.
Are you in San Francisco and interesting in joining? It’s been a great way to ease into blogging regularly. Let me know if you’d like to sign up.
