XeLaTeX for Sanskrit: update

In a post on 5 July 2010, I gave an example of how to use XeLaTeX with various fonts and various ways of inputting text.   Some time later, the commands in the Fontspec and Polyglossia packages were updated, and my example didn't work as advertised any more.  Here is an update that works again.

Here's the output:

And here's the updated input:

Changing publication models

With the growth of good desktop document processing software and the universality of good, free Unicode fonts, it is now entirely feasible for an individual to produce excellent camera-ready copy of an academic book for themselves, with modest effort over a modest period of time.

With services like Lulu and Createspace, the transition from a PDF on your computer to a hard-bound, published book sold online and through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc., is also very easy and cheap.  I mean, less than about $100, total cost.  I did a book with Lulu a couple of years ago (my father's memoirs), and I paid $60 to cover distribution through Amazon and all other big bookshops and online services.  Everything else was free.  The book is large, 650 pages, and costs about $50 for hardback, with free shipping in the USA (e.g., Amazon, B&N).    I also made the PDF downloadable directly from Lulu at $12.

What does all this mean?

What it means is that publishers are no longer necessary for performing the traditional roles of book production and distribution.   Authors can now do this satisfactorily for themselves at marginal cost, high quality, and with international distribution.

What remains?  What I call "Gatekeeping" services.  With today's deluge of free online resources, what we all really do need is someone to take responsibility for guaranteeing high intellectual quality.  Trustworthiness.

Traditionally, this was also a role performed by some publishers, especially the university presses.  A book on Buddhism from Cambridge University Press *should* be of a different calibre from a book on Buddhism from, say, Harlequin or Mills & Boon.   The good academic publishers acted as gatekeepers, offering an implicit guarantee of intellectual quality.

But if you look more closely at this arrangement, the university presses rely heavily on the free services of university staff for refereeing, book acquisition, series curation, and sometimes even content-editing and copy-editing.  In-house copy-editing was usual, however, and often of a high standard.

Another service that a big university press provides is prestige.  A young scholar with a book published by Princeton is likely to do better at getting a job than another with a book published with a publisher of less prestige.  This is because appointment committees are willing to take the implied quality-guarantee of Princeton UP.  But again, Princeton only publishes books because unpaid academic referees at universities give the thumbs-up.  The process is circular.

What does all this mean?

If books can be produced and distributed by academics themselves, and refereed and edited by them too, what is left for publishers?  Not much, I think, unless they dramatically change their business and service models.  

What we see going on today, I believe, are the last convulsions of a dying industry.  Yes, they're making a lot of money, but only because of the inertia and uncertainty of academics.  What used to be called FUD ("fear, uncertainty and doubt").  The upcoming younger generation of scholars with different preconceptions will probably not be so smitten by the prestige of old publishing houses, and will be more adept at self-publishing.

What remains is the need for gatekeeping, for the guaranteeing of quality.  If publishers really took that seriously, and divorced their editorial selections and quality judgements from their need to remain profitable, then they might salvage for themselves a genuine role in the future.  I cannot see a way in which genuine academic quality can be guaranteed by an institution that simultaneously has to satisfy criteria of profitability.  As long as their are two goals - quality and profit - there will inevitably arise cases of conflict and compromise.  In short, gatekeeping is the job of (publicly-funded) university staff, not a (commercial) publisher.

The alternative to this is that university staff take back into their own hands all the processes of the production and distribution of knowledge.  In fact, this is the change that the major funding bodies are pressing upon us, with the widespread requirement that publicly-funded academic research be published Open Access.  It is also the original idea of the university press.

Here's a hypothetical model for a future academic book series. 

• Author on a research grant or university salary writes a book. 
  
• The book is typeset using LibreOffice or TeX.  The university department provides some secretarial support to help, or some money from the research grant pays for smart word-processing by an agency.
• The book is sent to an external commercial copy-editing company to tidy up the details.  A smart, accurate PDF results. 
  This is paid for by the university department, or out of the research grant (this is already common).
• The PDF is submitted to a panel of academics somewhere who curate a book series, judging the intellectual quality of the submissions.  The book is accepted as an important intellectual contribution..
  
• The PDF is uploaded to Lulu.com or Createspace, where it is turned into a print-on-demand hardback book for sale internationally through Amazon etc., and in bookshops. 
  Lulu are the printers and distributors. 
  The ISBN is provided by the university department, so they are the publishers, not Lulu.  
• The book is advertised through a prestige university website that promotes the book as an intellectual contribution, contextualizes it as a university-curated product, and made available for sale through a simple click link to PayPal, Amazon, etc.  The university's series name is printed in the book, and splashed all over the website.

Ooops: high quality production, high quality intellectual content, university curation, international sales, but no "traditional" publisher!

Please blow holes in what I've said. There must be an elephant in the room that I'm not seeing.

(reproduced from my post to the INDOLOGY discussion list, 15 May 2013)

emusic.com solution for Linux

Emusic.com is a truly great music service, particularly since they have been non-DRM from their inception.

But - strangely - they have never supported Linux properly.

Many thanks indeed to Matt Woodward for pointing out that all Linux users need to do is install emusicj and then point and click this link:

• http://www.emusic.com/dlm/install/

!

Future philology

A very interesting and enjoyable Skype with Elenea Pierazzo at KCL left me with lots to think about, and links to all sorts of digital projects that I was unaware of or only half-aware of previously, including

• Interedition
• Gregor Middell's work on Juxta etc.
• Tanya Clement's work on Juxta etc.
• Digital Resource for Palaeography
• The various projects at the Huygens Institute in DH (here).
• The work of the European Society for Textual Scholarship (http://ests2012.huygens.knaw.nl/)
• Textualscholarship.nl
• http://www.e-laborate.nl/en/
• Edward Vanhoutte's work

Converting XeLaTeX into ODT or MS Word

TeX4ht can do a lot of the work of converting from LaTeX to wordprocessor.  But when one adds in the complications of UTF8 characters, multiple scripts, and XeLaTeX, things can get complicated.

C. V. Radhakrishnan today pointed me to this discussion on the TeX4ht mailing list:

• http://tug.org/pipermail/tex4ht/2013q1/000719.html
  (or more neatly, here.)

What Radhakrishnan says is:

As far as I understand, TeX4ht won't support fontspec or XeLaTeX
technologies of using system fonts that do not have *.tfm's. In effect, by
adopting TeX4ht, one is likely to loose the features brought in by XeTeX.
However, here is another approach.

   1. We translate all the Unicode character representations in the
   document to Unicode code points in 7bit ascii which is very much palatable
   to TeX4ht. A simple perl script, utf2ent.pl in the attached archive does
   the job.
   2. We run TeX4ht on the output of step 1.
   3. Open the *html in a browser, I believe, we get what you wanted. See
   the attached screen shot as it appeared in Firefox in my Linux box.

Here is what I did with your specimen document.

   1. commented out lines that related to fontspec package from your
   sources named as alex.tex.
   2. added four lines of macro code to digest the converted TeX sources
   3. ran the command: perl utf2ent.pl alex.tex > alex-ent.tex
   4. ran the command: htlatex alex-ent "xhtml,charset=utf-8,fn-in" -utf8
   (fn-in option is to keep the footnotes in the same document). I have used a
   local bib file, mn.bib as I didn't have your bib database. biber was also
   run in the meantime to process the bibliography database.
   5. open the output, alex-ent.html in a browser. I got it as you see in
   the attached alex.png.

 Radhakrishnan's PERL script utf2ent.pl is

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

for my $file ( @ARGV ){
  open my $fh, '<:utf8 br="" cannot="" die="" file:="" file="" open="" or="">   while( <$fh> ){
      s/([\x7f-\x{ffffff}])/'\\entity{'.ord($1).'}'/ge;
        print;
  }
}

For Radhakrishnan's continuing comments on TeX4ht development, see

• http://www.cvr.cc/?p=623#comments

TeX4ht's homepage:

• http://www.tug.org/tex4ht/

Some OA journals that publish S-Asia related research

(Short URL for this blog entry: http://tinyurl.com/sa-oaj)

	online	print	Fee required?*	Copyright	Notes
History of Science in South Asia	Y	Y	N	author's	Articles published with a CC licence from the author
Asian Literature and Translation	Y	not yet	N	author's	CC licence from the author
Ancient Asia	Y	N?	N?	author's	a CC licence is granted by the author to the publisher
Approaching Religion	Y	N?	N?
Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception	Y	Y, price to be decided	N	author's
Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde	Y	N	N
Asian Social Science	Y	Y	$300
Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online	Y	N	N
eJIM - eJournal of Indian Medicine	Y	Y, cost	N
Journal of History and Social Sciences	Y	N	N?
Annals of Ayurvedic Medicine	Y	N	N
Rivista di Studi Sudasiatici	Y	Y	N
Himalayan Linguistics	Y	N	N
Journal of South Asian Linguistics	Y	N	N?
Annual of Urdu Studies	Y	Y, cost	N
Pacific WorldJournal of the Institute of Buddhist Studies	Y	Y, free	N?	publisher
Health, Culture and Society	Y	N	N
Open Journal of Philosophy	Y	N	$400 + $50 per p. above 10 pp.	publisher
International Journal of Jaina Studies	Y	Y, on demand	N	publisher	Print copies handled by Hindi Granth Karyalay in Mumbai
Asian Ethnology olim Asian Folklore Studies	Y	Y	N?	publisher
Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies	Y	N	N?		restricted OA policy
Transcultural Studies	Y	N	N

And see the India-related list maintained by Scholars Without Borders (mostly science and medicine):

• http://www.swb.co.in/open-access-journals

Saying that a journal is OA still leaves some critical questions unanswered.  E.g.,

1. Is there a "going in" fee, or Article Processing Fee (APF)?
   Item 2 in the list above charges $300.  Several of the big houses like Elsevier and Springer will also publish your article as OA, even in an otherwise non-OA journal, if you pay them enough.  Their APF prices are typically $3000 (Springer, Elsevier).  I am not interested in including such journals in the list above, as I consider anything above $300-500 to be profiteering.  APFs of $300-500 are typical of some even very large OA publishers like Hindawi, proving that this is a valid business model. 
   Quite apart from my personal view, I do not think APF fees of $3000 meet most people's normal expectation of the meaning of an Open Access journal.  As South Asianists, we are interested in access for both readers and authors in countries where scholars are relatively poor.  As such, both Gratis OA and low or zero APFs are indexes of relevance.
2. Copyright: being OA means that whoever owns the copyright has given permission for the article to be disseminated at zero cost.  But it doesn't say anything about who owns the copyright of the article.  Many OA journals allow the authors to retain copyright, but not all.
3. Is the journal online-only, or both online and in print?
4. The online version is free by definition, but the print issues would usually cost something.  What?
5. Is the journal indexed by the main global indexing services?
6. Is the journal peer-reviewed? Strongly or weakly?

More distinctions (e.g., Gratis OA (free of price) and Libre OA (free of price and rights restrictions)) and discussion in Wikipedia (consulted 13 Feb 2012).  The Sherpa/Romeo website helps with some of this.

I'm putting some indicators in parentheses after the journal title, for those cases where I can find out the information without correspondence.

It is often hard to find out these facts from the journals' websites.  This suggests to me that for some of the editors, the various business models of OA publishing are not always well understood.



---
*APF = Article Processing Fee, a fee that the publisher charges the author or the author's institution for publication in the Open Access journal.  See discussion in Wikipedia (consulted 12 Feb 2012).

TeX implementations in the Cloud

• ShareLaTeX
  XeLaTeX and pdfLaTeX
• FlyLaTeX (self-hosting; It's a free and open-source version of ShareLatex.) 
• TeXTouch (iTunes)
• WriteLaTeX
  No XeLaTeX
• ScribTeX  (being phased out as of Feb 2013, in favour of ShareLaTeX)
  No XeLaTeX.
• CloudTeX
  XeLaTeX and LuaTeX supported.   Working prototype available to testers.
• A different CloudTeX
• MonkeyTeX
• Verbosus (with Android and iOS apps)
• Blue Publications
• LaTeXLab
• Pine in alpha test (a document processing system in the cloud that makes use of MediaWiki and its resources)
• SpanDex
  XeLaTeX and LuaTeX available, but limited Unicode fonts. Closed.

Business models for Open Access journals

It seems to be becoming clear that OA publishing will come to be the dominant model for academic periodical publications.  This change is happening rapidly in Science, Technology and Medicine publishing.  It can be expected that Humanities journals will eventually follow in even greater numbers than at present.

As things change, some interesting new business models are emerging.  See http://peerJ.com, for example.  It turns on its head the idea of subscribing to a learned society and getting the society's journal.  Quite fascinating. 

See also the new OA projects by CUP, (£500 publishing fee) and especially Tim Gowers' blog., that describes several key points clearly.


Some of my own thoughts

In August 2008 I did some brain-storming on this subject with my friends C. V. Radhakrishnan and Kaveh Bazargan.  Here are some of my notes from those exchanges.

I was thinking about this problem that if the funding model changes from "reader pays" to "author pays", then not everyone could afford to publish.  Independent scholars, or those at 3rd world universities, might be priced out of publication.

1. An OA journal *must* consider itself free to publish good peer-reviewed research, whether or not there's funding.  So there has to be a "let-out" or discretionary waiver clause in any statement about pricing.
2. Would it be feasible for the journal to have a sliding scale of charges that is directly keyed to the budget of the institution to which the author belongs?  University budgets should be publicly available somewhere, shouldn't they?  It might take a bit of work to track them down, but it could be done.  Or the authors could simply be asked to provide that information.  In any case, if a university has a big endowment or annual budget, then their staff would be charged more to publish in the journal, and v.v.  Independent scholars would be free (?) or <$100. 
   
   The general idea is that a scholar from Cambridge Univ. or the TIFR, Bombay, could be charged $500 to publish an article in our hypothetical OA journal, on the assumption that his department has a budget for this (an "article processing fee").  Whereas Prof. Shivaramakrishna from a Jnanamatha in Trichy, or a Dr Salvador from Havana Univ., could be permitted to publish at $30.
   
   Or if direct keying is not easy to implement, there could at least be general funding bands: we could find somebody else's ranking, perhaps UNESCO, for national education budgets, or educational funding, and use those as bands for submission charges.
3. Here's an important tweak.  I think this kind of banded charging can be thought of a bit like Google's AdSense advertising system.  Basically, the university is paying to have its name associated with the research that is published.  So at the top of the article it says,
   
     Dominik Wujastyk
     University College London
     [university address]
   
   and the University pays the journal $100 (or whatever) for document processing.
   
   However, if I - as an author - choose, I can say instead,
   
      Dominik Wujastyk
      Independent Scholar
      [home address]
   
   and then there would be no charge for document processing.
   
   It wouldn't matter to the journal whether it was actually true or not that DW was an "independent scholar". The point is, if there's no payment, then the university or research sponsor doesn't get its name mentioned, and is therefore not formally associated with the research. This treats the association of the university's name with the research rather like advertising or product placement.
   
   Most research contracts require the academic to include acknowledgement in his publications of the source of the funding. "This research was carried out under grant 123456789 of the National Science Foundation". So if the NSF is making such a requirement, they have to pay for it to be done. It's quite like advertising.