Iamus and Intentionality

In the article "Iamus, classical music's computer composer, live from Malaga" (in the Online Guardian), Philip Ball describes the computer program Iamus that is emerging as a disturbing presence in the field of modern classical music. While discussing how we seek for authorial meaning and significance music, he asks,

How does a performer interpret these pieces, given that there's no "intention" of the composer to look for? "Suppose I found a score in a library without knowing who wrote it," says Díaz-Jerez. "I approach these pieces as I would that one – by analysing the score to see how it works." In that respect, he sees no difference from deducing the structure of a Bach fugue.

You can compare it with computer chess, says the philosopher of music Stephen Davies, of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. "People said computers wouldn't be able to show the same original thinking, as opposed to crunching random calculations. But now it's hard to see the difference between people and computers with respect to creativity in chess. Music, too, is rule-governed in a way that should make it easily simulated."

This reminds me strongly of the discussion that took place amongst Mīmāṃsaka philosophers in India about the possibility of a injunctive force being exerted by a scripture having no author and therefore no inherent intentionality (see, e.g., John Taber on this topic).

What would a Mīmāṃsaka say about computer-generated music?  Or computer-generated scripture, for that matter?

And can you tell human- and computer-generated music apart?  Take this test :-)

Well-mannered Medicine published

I'm ever so proud about the publication this month of Dagmar's new book, Well-Mannered Medicine: Medical Ethics and Etiquette in Classical Ayurveda.

Please note that there are now two different "D. Wujastyk"s publishing on the history of science and medicine in South Asia. :-)

Here's the blurb:

Well-Mannered Medicine explores the moral discourses on the practice of medicine in the foundational texts of Ayurveda.

The classical ayurvedic treatises were composed in Sanskrit between the first and the seventh centuries CE, and later works, dating into the sixteenth century CE, are still considered strongly authoritative.  As Wujastyk shows, these works testify to an elaborate system of medical ethics and etiquette. Physicians looked to the ayurvedic treatises for a guide to professional conduct. Ayurvedic discourses on good medical practice depict the physician as highly-educated, skilled, moral, and well-mannered. The rules of conduct positioned physicians within mainstream society and characterized medical practice as a trustworthy and socially acceptable profession. At the same time, professional success was largely based on a particular physician's ability to cure his patients. This resulted in tension, as some treatments and medications were considered socially or religiously unacceptable. Doctors needed to treat their patients successfully while ostensibly following the rules of acceptable behavior.
Wujastyk offers insight into the many unorthodox methods of avoiding conflict while ensuring patient compliance shown in the ayurvedic treatises, giving a disarmingly candid perspective on the realities of medical practice and its crucial role in a profoundly well-mannered society.

---

Editorial Reviews

"Dagmar Wujastyk's thorough study of medical ethics in classical Ayurvedic texts adds substantially to our knowledge of Ayurveda as a medical system. Ethics here includes the moral attributes required of a physician, personal presentation, medical education, the doctor-patient relationship, medical deception, and much more. In this first rate study, Wujastyk avoids the danger of evaluating Ayurveda from the standpoint of Western medicine. This is required reading for everyone with an interest in Indian medicine or cross-cultural medical history."--Frederick M. Smith, Professor of Sanskrit and Classical Indian Religions, University of Iowa

About the Author

Dagmar Wujastyk is a postdoctoral research fellow at Zurich University in Switzerland and co-editor of Modern and Global Ayurveda - Pluralism and Paradigms. She has taught Sanskrit at the University of Bonn and Cambridge University.

Sanskrit hyphenation list

I'm gradually building up a file of hyphenated Sanskrit words and compounds, written in the Latin alphabet.  The file is called sanskrit-hyphenations.tex, and you are welcome to download it.

It contains hyphenation points for words in English (ayur-veda), and for words in Sanskrit (āyur-veda).
 To use it, do something like this in your style file:

\setotherlanguage{sanskrit}
\newfontfamily\sanskritfont{Sanskrit 2003}
% Define \sansk{} which is the same as \emph{}, except
% that it causes appropriate hyphenation
% for Sanskrit words.  Use \sansk{} for Sanskrit and
% \emph{} for English.
\newcommand{\sansk}[1]{\emph{\textsanskrit{#1}}}

 and \input the sanskrit-hyphenations.tex file after \begin{document}, thus:

\begin{document}
  \input{sanskrit-hyphenations.tex}
...
\end{document}

XeTeX  already has built-in hyphenation rules for Devanāgarī and Romanized Sanskrit. The above file is intended to extend the hyphenation coverage for Romanized words, using etymological and stylistic considerations.

(Deep breath) Medical history again

The story so far

My three previous blogs on this topic are, in chronological order,  1 here, 2 here, and 3 here.
(All my blogs on the topic of the journal Medical History are collected here.)

1. In the first post, I sketched the history of this important journal and expressed regret about the journal's move from the Free-to-read, Open Access, author's copyright model to a pay-to-read, closed access, publisher's copyright model. 
   
   The journal's new editor, Sanjoy Bhattacharya, responded here, defending the new policies.
2. I responded here, noting that the new website was inconsistent, and that there were unsolved contradictions about payment structures, and that in no case did the publisher offer the author the option of retaining copyright.
3. When the first new issue appeared in January 2012, I noted that articles were freely downloadable and authors were ascribed copyright. This was very good for the authors and readers, but some contradictory information about rights and payments continued to be present on the publisher's website. 

And now...

No abstract

The April 2012 issue of Medical History is out.  I'm sorry indeed to see that things have changed for both this issue and the previous January one.  The freedoms that were earlier present in the January issue have been revoked.  The statements giving authors copyright have been removed.  Articles are not freely downloadable.

No way to read the article...

Most bizarre of all, no articles are now readable at all.  Even at a price.  The website give abstracts for most - but not all - articles (see above right).  But that's all.  Even if you have an account with the CUP journals site, and log in, you still cannot read any articles in Medical History.
You can link to them, you can refer to them, you can link, blog and write to the author.  You can request permissions, e.g., to reprint or copy the article.  You can do most things, except reading the articles (see left).

This surely has to be a temporary glitch?

If you are logging in from an institutional licensee, such as a university network, then yes, you can download the PDFs.  But if you do not have such an affiliation, then you cannot download any article.

No downloads at PMC

I thought that perhaps the articles were now at Pub Med Central (PMC), as Sanjoy had said they would be, and that readers were meant to know this and read the articles from there.  But that's not the case either.  Neither of the new issues has appeared at PMC (see right).  It was always understood that there would be a time-lag before articles appeared at PMC, and the journal is starting again from zero, administratively speaking, so perhaps it's just a matter of patience before the freely-downloadable version of the articles appear.

Subscription prices

However, as long as an individual cannot download the articles at all from anywhere, I suppose the only way to read the journal is to order a printed copy.  But one can only buy the printed journal if one is an organisation (left).  So for anyone who doesn't have access to an institutional licence, access to Medical History is limited or impossible.

Back issues

And, confusingly, CUP is offering to sell rights to consult the past archive, that the Wellcome Trust has paid for already to be freely available at PMC: "... access to the digitised archive must be purchased separately. Please email [so-and-so] for a tailored package quote." This again must be a glitch.

In general, it looks as if CUP is trying to fit Medical History into a Procrustean bed designed for its other more commercial offerings.

On CUP's MH website under "back issues / digitised archive," selected past issues of MH are now displayed (see right).  But once again, there is no button for actually downloading a PDF for any of the articles.  Nor is there any link to PMC, where whole journal from 1957-2011 is already available free.

New Open Access Policy

I think the terms of the Open Access agreement for Medical History have changed since I last looked at them.  I don't remember seeig the following statement:

If you choose to publish your article in this way [Open Access] you are required to complete the following form, within one week of your
manuscript being accepted for publication by Medical History. If you prefer not to take part in the Open Access option,
you need not do anything; your article will be published in the usual way, with access to the complete text being available only
to subscribers. [my bold]
The corresponding author should complete this form, and by doing so he or she authorises that the full charge of £425/$675,
plus VAT where applicable, will be paid.

CUP will NOT grant Open Access to your article unless you pay them $675.  This statement raises serious questions about whether all articles will continue to appear in PMC, as asserted by Sanjoy and as desired by the Wellcome Trust.

Summary

So, where do things stand now?

1. Authors don't have copyright, in any model of publication in MH.
2. Articles are not freely downloadable.
3. Articles cannot be downloaded at all by private persons, even for purchase.
4. Private persons apparently cannot buy the print version of journal issues.
5. CUP wants to charge for access to past archived issues of the journal.
6. No article will be available Open Access unless $675 is paid by the author.

I still hope that some of these issues are just teething problems.  I also hope that, as Sanjoy said, articles will appear as free downloads at the PMC site, in a "version of record," and that the current de facto embargo period of six months and growing is also just an initial administrative problem.

Between 2005 and 2011, Medical History was an Open Access journal that assigned copyright to individual authors, and charged no fee to authors or to readers.  The journal embraced all the best and most innovative models of the distribution of scholarly knowledge (see Open knowledge, Open definition, Open Access).   That model of publication has been abandoned, in favour of a closed-access, strongly commercialized system.  If all MH articles start to appear for free, full-text, version-of-record download at PMC, it will make a big difference.  But it remains hard to see how the commercial and copyright requirements of CUP can be squared with free distribution though PMC.

Xapian niceness

In older Linuxes, if xapian indexing is sucking up all your CPU cycles, here's a fix:

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9304431#post9304431

I believe this is long ago fixed in Ubuntu releases and doesn't need to be done manually.

Crowdsourcing manuscript transcription

The TEI world is discussing, amongst many things, the crowdsourcing of MS transcription.  This idea seems to hold great promise for the Indian case.  After all, we've got crowds, right?  As always, the issue is quality control.

But just for a moment, imagine the scenario of an open, public, collaborative website where anybody can bring up an image of a Sanskrit manuscript and write a transcription in an adjacent window.  A transcription that - like a Wikipedia article - would be open for others to improve or annotate, that would rely on crowdsourced cognitive surplus for contribution and gradual quality improvement.  It would be under a history/version control system, so everything would be trackable.  Contributors would earn trust points or, as in eBay's feedback score. 

Ben Brumfield has created an extremely useful survey of MS transcription tools here.

His own FromThePage service looks simple to use and very attractive for a proof-of-concept pilot project.

For example, the Transcribe Bentham project has developed this way of working:

See also the other video about markup, on their "getting started" page.

All the exciting work in MS and edition work today is happening in connection with the TEI framework, and based on transcribed MSS with TEI encoding.  Juxta, the Versioning Machine, etc.  We need to start thinking about creating a public, high-quality corpus of transcribed MSS.  Such a corpus would be the basis for many future projects.

See also:

• http://scripto.org/ Scripto (and Omeka)
  
• http://mel.hofstra.edu/textlab.html John Bryant's TextLab 
• http://t-pen.org/TPEN/ T-Pen

-----

References

• Clay Shirkey's Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (2011). And a TED talk on the same subject.
• Transcribe Bentham project at UCL .

Two more good Devanāgarī fonts

I have posted an update to this post with some new material.

Steve White has recently done a great deal of work updating the FreeSerif and FreeSans Unicode fonts (that are, er, free).   He has done especially important work on the Devanagari characters in the font, as well as several other Indian writing systems.  See here for a listing of what has changed. Steve's work means that the Devanāgarī in the Free* fonts now works not only with Xe(La)TeX but also in Firefox, LibreOffice and other programs.  Thanks, Steve!

Zdeněk Wagner recently announced (here) that,

A few days ago version 20120503 of GNU FreeFont was released. This (OpenType as well as TrueType) version contains working Devanagari. FreeSans is based on Gargi with bugs fixed and positions of matras fine-tuned (and changes were reported back to the Gargi developers), FreeSerif is based on Velthuis fonts. Both fonts contain the Indian Rupee sign. In XeLaTeX, conjuncts in FreeSerif can be switched on/off according to the language.

Zdeněk provided an example file showing FreeSans and FreeSerif, and demonstrating the different conjuncts of Sanskrit and Hindī.  I have taken the liberty of expanding his file to compare some of the other leading Unicode fonts that contain both Devanāgarī and Latin typefaces in the same font:

XeLaTeX Input:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\defaultfontfeatures{Mapping=RomDev,Script=Devanagari,Language=Sanskrit}
\newfontfamily\eng[Mapping=tex-text]{TeX Gyre Pagella}
\begin{document}
\setmainfont{FreeSerif} \newfontfamily\eng[Mapping=tex-text]{FreeSerif}
{\eng FreeSerif} = शक्ति, kārtsnyam {\addfontfeatures{Language=Hindi} Hindī = शक्ति}
\setmainfont{FreeSans} \newfontfamily\eng[Mapping=tex-text]{FreeSans}
{\eng FreeSans} = शक्ति, kārtsnyam {\addfontfeatures{Language=Hindi} Hindī = शक्ति}
\setmainfont{Sanskrit 2003} \newfontfamily\eng[Mapping=tex-text]{Sanskrit 2003}
{\eng Sanskrit 2003} = शक्ति, kārtsnyam {\addfontfeatures{Language=Hindi} Hindī = शक्ति}
\setmainfont[FakeStretch=1.08]{Sanskrit 2003}
{\eng Sanskrit 2003+} = शक्ति, kārtsnyam {\addfontfeatures{Language=Hindi} Hindī = शक्ति}
\setmainfont{Nakula} \newfontfamily\eng[Mapping=tex-text]{Nakula}
{\eng Nakula} = शक्ति, kārtsnyam {\addfontfeatures{Language=Hindi} Hindī = शक्ति}
\setmainfont{Sahadeva} \newfontfamily\eng[Mapping=tex-text]{Sahadeva}
{\eng Sahadeva} = शक्ति, kārtsnyam {\addfontfeatures{Language=Hindi} Hindī = शक्ति}
\end{document}
Output:

(click to enlarge)

Note the use of the RomDev mapping to get "कार्त्स्न्यम्" out of "kārtsnyam", just for fun.  I've included Sanskrit 2003 twice, the second time with a bit of horizontal stretch, that I think makes it look nicer.

The official web page of the newly-updated FreeSans and FreeSerif fonts is:

• https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/

As Zdeněk adds, ``Hopefully the font will soon appear in TeX Live and (some) Linux distributions. If you install it independently, be sure that you do not have font conflicts."

Be sure to delete all earlier versions of FreeSerif and FreeSans that might be lurking on your hard drive.  Then install the new version.  If you find the conjuncts aren't working as promised, you probably have an old FreeSerif or Sans lurking in a directory somewhere that you have forgotten about.

Medical History (cont.)

The January 2012 issue of the journal Medical History has now appeared online (here).  This is the first issue with the new publishers and under the new editorship.

The good news is that

• the articles are copyrighted to the authors, and
• articles are freely downloadable.  

This is very good for the authors and readers.  However, the terms on which the papers may be distributed are not stated.  The authors may not wish their papers to be copied, or they may wish to charge for copies, or they may wish to apply one of the several Creative Commons licenses.  Nothing is stated.  However, since the PDFs of the papers are freely downloadable from the CUP website, obviously this is what the authors and the publisher intend readers to do.

If you click the "Request Permissions" on the CUP website, then a window opens in which CUP asserts its own copyright of the article.

A menu system lets you request various things, including the right to make photocopies not-for-profit.  The charge for this right (not the copies themselves) is about $5 per copy.  This charging option appears to be an honour system.

The Transfer of Copyright form is still presented for authors to sign (here), by which authors sign over their copyright to CUP.  But since authors seem to be keeping their copyright (a very good thing) perhaps these forms are just a relic, and will be withdrawn.

The same applies to the Open Access Transfer of Copyright form (here), which asks authors to send CUP £425/$675 (plus VAT) for giving their copyright to CUP and having CUP publish their articles under an Open Access license.  Perhaps if one paid this fee, the "Request Permissions" page would not ask for money for photocopies?  In any case, since everyone can download the articles freely already, and they are copyrighted to the authors, there would seem to be little incentive to pay the above fee.  The authors - who own the copyright - could themselves choose to place a Creative Commons license on their work, for example an Attribution-NoCommercial-NoDerivs license, thereby releasing any reader from the obligation to pay anything for making copies or using the article in teaching, linking to it from a Moodle website, etc.

So, at present, the rights and distribution situation with Medical History shows real promise.  Authors are retaining their copyright, and articles are freely downloadable from the CUP website.  This is great   In due course, presumably the articles will also appear in the online Medical History archive at the National Library of Medicine / Pub Med Central (here), as the editor, Sanjoy Bhattacharya said they would.

Residual confusions exist because of the continuing statements on the journal's CUP website that CUP owns the copyright of the articles, and that it wants authors to transfer their rights to CUP and to pay fees for Open Access distribution.  It is very much to be hoped that these are just teething problems and that the journal will continue to

• allow authors to retain copyright 
• that authors will not be charged any "article processing fee", and
• that articles will be freely readable by anyone anywhere.

A gold star for Gnome 3

When Canonical decided that Ubuntu would have a new user-interface, "Unity," to replace Gnome 2, there was a lot resistance and discontent in the Ubuntu user community.  Gnome 2 was a drop-down (or pop-up) menu system, harking back in a general way to the familiar Windows interface.

People who didn't like Unity could easily just go on using Gnome 2, at least for the foreseeable future (and switch to MATE after Gnome 2).

But the other alternative was to use Gnome 3, the official successor to Gnome 2.  Gnome 3 and Unity have quite a lot in common.  In fact, and it's clear that the Unity user interface is - broadly speaking - based on the same thinking as Gnome 3 about where user interfaces might be going.

As is documented in this blog, I was willing to give Unity a shot, and I even quite liked it.  But I had a lot of technical difficulties with Unity, so I decided to try Gnome 3.

Now I've been using Gnome 3 for nearly six months, and I'm very much at home with it.  And I'd like to put in a good word.  Recently, I had to work briefly with the old  Gnome 2 menus, and I couldn't believe how slow and fiddly the old interface now felt, after being thoroughly used to Gnome 3.

So, from me, at least, a gold star for Gnome 3.

"Medical History" going from free, Open Access, Creative Commons licensed to copyright-controlled closed access (contd.)

Hi, Sanjoy, thanks for responding. 

What you say in your comment differs from what the CUP website says, and on all the most important points.  Some things still need clearing up.

If all authors are to retain copyright, why does the CUP website for medical history present "Transfer of Copyright" forms to prospective MH authors? Here's the location:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayMoreInfo?jid=MDH&type=tcr

The first, non-OA form says, "The Journal's policy is to acquire copyright in all contributions."

The second, OA form also requires authors to transfer their copyright to CUP in full, just like the first.  In spite of having paid a $1350 fee to CUP, authors who sign this form will not retain copyright of their own work.  It is CUP, as the new copyright holder, who will offer a Creative Commons licence, not the author.  As they say in the form, "Cambridge University Press will licence such uses under the following Creative Commons licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike".  And in fact, it is not even a full CC licence, since CUP specifically forbids authors from using their articles in certain ways.

In all cases, therefore, both closed- and open- access, the CUP website clearly states that it is CUP and not the authors who will hold the copyright.  This is the opposite of the journal's policy from 2005 to 2011, and the opposite of what you say in your comment above.

Where the CUP website talks about "Gold Open Access",
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displaySpecialPage?pageId=3384
I think they are being slightly misleading.  They say, "Gold Open Access: Authors may opt to publish their article under a Creative Commons licence by paying a one-off article processing charge, making their article freely available to all."  I think most readers would, like you, assume from this statement that it is the author who will own the Creative Commons licence.  But that is incorrect.  CUP will be the owner of the CC license, and the copyright.  The author is paying CUP so that CUP - qua copyright holder - will issue a CC licence.  The author's relationship to their own research is therefore just the same as any other member of the public, with CUP controlling all the rights.

--

Can you really confirm that the PMC version of MH articles will be, as you say, the "final version of record"?  The CUP documentation
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displaySpecialPage?pageId=3384
uses the phrase "Accepted Manuscript" which is not the same thing.  An "accepted manuscript" would normally not have the pagination of the final version, nor the final edits of CUP's editorial staff.  So it is not usually an adequate source for scholarly citation, and it is not what appears in print.

If you are right in asserting that it is the "final version of record" that will go into PMC, then I think readers of your comment may wonder why any MH author would ever choose to pay the $1350 "Golden" fee, if their article is already freely available on the web in "final, published version of record".  Does it seem good value to pay $1350 in order to have one's article available from a second website, when it is already freely downloadable from PMC?

I look forward to your clarifications.

And to be clear myself: I applaud your efforts to give MH a future, and I applaud the Wellcome Trust for their generosity.  I just sincerely hope that the new deal for MH isn't Faustian.  The model under which MH operated from 2005 was so exemplary - with true, free OA, and authors' copyright - that it would inevitably be sad to see the doors slamming shut.

CUP online article rental

As you can tell, I'm interested in newly-emerging models for the distribution of academic knowledge.

Cambridge University Press sells articles from its journals for about $30 each.  But they have also introduced a "rental" system, whereby they will give you online access to the PDF of an article for 24 hours at a much lower price, typically $5.99.  See here for an example.  A rented article cannot be downloaded, printed or cut-n-pasted (details here).

I have not been able to test this service, because it depends on a java applet, and on my system this does not initialize correctly.  I get a blank screen.  I've tried both Firefox and Chromium.  I'm using a correct and up-to-date version of java,

java version "1.6.0_23"OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.11pre) (6b23~pre11-0ubuntu1.11.10.2)OpenJDK Server VM (build 20.0-b11, mixed mode)

running under Ubuntu, all very standard.  It seems likely that CUP hasn't tested their new rental delivery system widely enough yet.  CUP gives no warnings about any problems, nor any specifications about special systems or computer platforms that may be necessary.  All they say is that you need a browser and internet access.
Caveat emptor.

This is an interesting model, and I think I quite like it.  The abstracts of articles are available freely, so one can get a reasonably good idea of what is likely to be in the article without paying anything.  It would be better to have page one also.  The 24-hour access is interesting because it means you have to decide to read the article just before you rent it.  You have a day and a night to read it.  Sometimes I download an article but then never get round to reading it.  The rental system makes that impossible.  You can't keep it, and your time is running out, so it is likely that you will pay and then read the thing there and then, barring interruptions from your children.

The price, $5.99, is nearly right, but it is still too high.  It is a deterrent price.  It effectively stops you browsing items that might-or-might-not be of interest.  It kills serendipity, which is a crucial element of serious academic research.  A reasonable price would be $3-$4, which in today's economy is a fair price for something that is likely to be only about 20 pages long at the outside, and usually of undetermined value to your research.  Compare with emusic.com charging £0.42-£0.49 for a single track from a CD.

"Medical History" going from free, Open Access, Creative Commons licensed to copyright-controlled closed access

In a controversial move, the journal Medical History is moving from being an "Open Access, no Article Processing Fee" journal to being a closed, copyrighted, fee-charging journal.

1957: the launch

The first issue of Medical History, edited by W. J. Bishop, appeared in 1957 (front matter).  Medical History rapidly established itself as a journal of primary importance in the field of medical history, especially in the anglophone world.  In many ways the evolution of the journal's content from 1957 to the present day is a mirror of the evolution of the field of medical history itself, from the reminiscences of senior physicians to the work of professionalised medical and social historians.  From its earliest issues it included the writings of such figures as Charles Singer, Lynn Thorndike, and Walter Pagel, and over more than half a century Medical History has become a journal of record for its academic field.

At its launch, the journal was printed and published by Dawsons of Pall Mall.  An annual subscription to four issues cost $7.50, or $2.50 for society members.

1960: Wellcome Trust funding

In 1960, just a year before his death, Bishop published a letter to the readers announcing that the Wellcome Trust had made a five-year grant to enable the journal to continue publication.  This grant was an appropriate decision by the Trust, at that time still bound by the terms of Sir Henry Wellcome's Will that included a stipulation that the Trust should support the study of the history of medicine (see, e.g., the first and first and second reports of the Wellcome Trust).

1965: Wellcome Trust ownership

Five years later, when the Wellcome Trust's initial grant came to an end, Dawsons decided no longer to publish the journal, and "surrendered all their rights in the journal."  Its publication was transferred to the Wellcome Historical Medical Library (see here).  Since the WHML was owned and solely funded by the Wellcome Trust, this change effectively institutionalised the Trust's support for Medical History.  That support has enabled the journal to continue publication until last year.

2005-2011: The Open Access years

But the single biggest change in the journal's history came in 2005.  That year, the Wellcome Trust issued a public statement as follows:

Medical History – entire archive freely available online

The first complete archive of a medical history journal has been deposited into PubMed Central, as part of a £1.25 million programme led by the Wellcome Trust, Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the US National Library of Medicine (NLM). 

In addition to the digitization of the back catalogue, all future issues of Medical History will be made freely available online at the time of publication.

This project supports the Wellcome Trust’s position of supporting open access to scientific literature, and complements the ongoing work to establish a UK PubMed Central. 

(Bold print mine.  See full announcement.)

The editors of Medical History also announced the move to Open Access in a statement in July 2005, and an agreement was signed between the Wellcome Trust and UCL in September 2005 that stipulated that all intellectual property for the journal was vested in UCL, that all management decisions would be taken by the editors at the UCL Wellcome Centre, and that the journal would be completely Open Access.

Following these changes, the entire archive of Medical History, from 1957 to the present, was digitized and put online at PubMedCentral (here), and publication in print and online was handled by the British Medical Journal Group.

Between 2005 and 2011, in accordance with the Wellcome Trust's Open Access policy, each issue of Medical History has appeared in print and online more or less simultaneously.  As the Trust says on its website,

It is a fundamental part of our charitable mission to ensure that the work we fund can be read and utilised by the widest possible audience. We therefore support unrestricted access to the published outputs of research through our open access policy.

Not only were the articles in Medical History published Open Access, but the journal charged no Article Processing Fee (APF).  For both authors and readers, Medical History was free. And authors retained their copyright under a Creative Commons license.  These are the most enlightened policies in the three key issues of modern academic publishing: free authorship, free readership, and authors' retention of copyright.  (A large contemporary literature discusses the new business models underlying these new structures of academic publishing.)

As everyone knows, these policies are critically important for authors on low incomes, including scholars from eastern Europe and many parts of Asia and Africa.  Only these policies guarantee that readers everywhere can benefit from research findings, and that researchers can contribute their own work for open publication and dissemination without encountering a financial barrier.  The Wellcome Trust and the journal's editors broke important new ground in this policy change, adopting the highest ethical and research standards.

2006: EAHMJ partnership

In 2006, Medical History partnered with the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health, becoming the official journal of that association, and accepting EAHMH members onto its board of editors (announcement).  In doing so, the journal returned to its roots in one sense, since it had started in 1957 as the organ of a consortium of medical history societies.  At the time of writing (spring 2012), the EAHMH website still presents Medical History as its society journal, stating that,

The EAHMH encourages publication in the journal Medical History. Medical History is a refereed journal devoted to all aspects of the history of medicine and health, with the goal of broadening and deepening the understanding of the field, in the widest sense, by historical studies of the highest quality. It is also the journal of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health. The membership of the Editorial Board, which includes senior members of the EAHMH, reflects the commitment to the finest international standards in refereeing of submitted papers and the reviewing of books.

Plans were made in 2009 to bring Medical History and the EAHMH closer together, creating a single subscription to both the journal and to the society.  However, before these plans could be finalized, the Wellcome Centre closed and the management of the journal moved briefly into limbo.

2010: The Wellcome Trust Centre shuts

The chief editors of Medical History were always senior research staff at the Wellcome Historical Medical Library.  That institution changed its name several times, finally becoming the "Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London" in 2000 (announcement by its then Director Roy Porter).

Ten years later, in 2010, in a controversial change of policy, the Wellcome Trust announced the closure of the Wellcome Centre (Wellcome Trust announcement, Times Higher Education reports here, and here, The Telegraph).  The majority of senior staff retired or dispersed to other centres worldwide, and Centre's programs in teaching and research were closed.  A small cross-departmental group remained at UCL, focussing on the history of neuroscience (here).  What would happen to Medical History?

2011: Interregnum

After the closing of the Wellcome Trust Centre, editorial control of the journal passed to UCL staff, including Roger Cooter and Vivian Nutton, who wrote an editorial statement in 2011 that was bullish about the future health of the journal, in spite of the closure of the Centre and the presumed loss of Wellcome Trust funding (Nutton and Cooter 2011 and  Cooter 2011).  Just one more issue of Medical History has appeared in the Open Access PubMedCentral archive since the last statement, the fourth and last for 2011.  At the time of writing (Feb 2012), references to Medical History on the UCL website lead to dead links.

2012: Cambridge University Press takes over

An announcement on 30 Jan 2012 by Cambridge University Press explains that the editorial control of Medical History has moved to the University of York, and that the journal has a new editor, Sanjoy Bhattacharya, a reviews editor, and an editorial board comprising no fewer than forty-six members, about thirty more editors than the journal has ever had before.  The journal is still supported by the Wellcome Trust, though details are not given.  According to an announcement by Bhattacharya, "the ownership of this journal has passed to Cambridge University Press." 

Cambridge University Press (CUP) is now operating the journal as a Closed Access journal.  If you wish to publish your article Open Access with a Creative Commons license, and retain your own copyright, you must pay $1350 or £850 (here).  CUP requires all non-paying authors to sign a contract transferring their copyright to CUP (contracts here).  The contract permits authors to post a pre-publication, pre-final-editing copy on their own or their university's website.  The terms also state that, "All articles will automatically be deposited in PubMedCentral upon publication" (statement).  But since PubMedCentral is an Open Access, full text website, it is hard to see why an author would pay $1350 if the full text of their article is to appear free in PubMedCentral in any case.  The answer seems to be in the terms of CUP's contract, that suggests that it only the pre-publication version of articles that will appear in PubMedCentral from now on, and not the final published version, as in the past.

At the time of writing (Feb 2012) the January issue of Medical History has not appeared in PubMedCentral.  It will be interesting to see the terms on which it does appear there.

CUP website

PubMedCentral

Cambridge University Press is keen to promote the journal by pointing to its illustrious past, and has a "Highlights of a Decade" page, showcasing selected articles.  But several of these articles, although originally published Open Access and copyrighted by their authors, are presented on CUP's website as being published by CUP, and have been assigned a DOI pointing to CUP's website, and a statement that the article was published online on 07 December 2011.  There is no reference to PubMedCentral, where the articles were actually published online, and much earlier, and where they are still freely downloadable.  CUP did not publish these articles.  The full text of the articles is not available on the CUP website, nor is there any suggestion that these "Highlights of a Decade" can be read freely at PubMedCentral.

Maybe CUP will solve these problems in the future, and come to a more graceful accommodation with the Medical History's Open Access past.

---

References and notes

Editors of Medical History:

• W. J. Bishop, (1957-1961), 5 years.
• F. N. L. Poynter (1962-1972),  11 years.
• Edwin Clarke (1973-1979),  7 years.
• William F. Bynum and Vivian Nutton (1980-1999),  21 years.
• William F. Bynum and Anne Hardy (2000-2002), 3 years.
• Harold J. Cook and Anne Hardy (2003- 2010), 8 years.
• Vivian Nutton and Roger Cooter (2011),
• Sanjoy Bhattacharya (2012- )

Resources

• John Symons, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine : a Short History (London: Wellcome Trust, 1993), is the best account of the Institute's history.
• Vivian Nutton, "Half a Century of Medical History" Medical History, 2007: 1-2, is a brief overview of the journal's history.

Declaration of interest

I have published in Medical History.

T500+ubuntu 11.10 = slow wifi network access

News, November 2012: 

The problem described below went away with the upgrade to Ubuntu 12.10 (Linux kernel 3.5).  Thank goodness, and high time.
 
--

There's a bug between the Thinkpad T500 and wireless n transmission.

Bug discussion here, fix here, thanks to Damon:

sudo rmmod iwlagn
sudo echo "options iwlagn 11n_disable=1" > /etc/modprobe.d/disable11n.conf
sudo modprobe iwlagn

Timpanaro

Last year some time (2011), I read the first chapter of Timpanaro's The Freudian Slip (another tr. available here).  At the end of the chapter, I let out a roar of spontaneous laughter, because of the sheer absurdity and over-learnedness of Timpanaro's writing.  Let me explain.

Timpanaro is examining the opening episode of Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life.  In that justly-famous work, Freud narrates a meeting in which a young jewish man fumes about anti-semitism in Austria, ending with a citation from Virgil (Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor (Aeneid, IV 625)) that he gets slightly wrong.  In a virtuoso display of cleverness and psychological interpretation, Freud shows that the error, or slip, was not as random as it seemed, and that all sorts of things about the young man's suppressed hopes and fears can be deduced by careful thought about these errors.  Freud's account is hugely entertaining, real Sherlock Holmes stuff.

What Timpanaro does, at  e n o r m o u s  length, and with staggering erudition, is to argue that the young man's error can be explained by the mechanism of banalization, just like some of the slips of scribes copying manuscripts.  Timpanaro's display of erudition is truly gob-smacking.  (And I use this crude characterisation as a deliberate counterpoint.)

But what is Timpanaro saying, finally?

Timpanaro is saying what Freud himself is thought to have said so very much better: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

Timpanaro's display of intellectual fireworks is not just hors de nécessité
in my view.  It is otiose.  The cigar comment makes exactly the same point.  It makes it concisely, clearly, and with humour to boot.

Furthermore, the whole point of Freud's Psychopathology and the Virgil misquotation story is that things one might think are banal may, through analysis, be shown not to be banal at all.  For Timpanaro to say "yes, yes, it's banal" is to miss the most essential point of what Freud is saying.  Whether or not this particular episode was banal or not, Timpanaro is being obtuse in asserting that it was.

Burning the Library of Alexandria, again

The website formerly known as http://library.nu used to provide free downloads of PDFs of published academic books, often in violation of copyright. A few days ago, a consortium of publishers aggressively closed down the site and is seeking to bankrupt the people who ran it, and possibly send them to jail.

At the request of 17 publishing companies in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, including HarperCollins, Oxford University Press and Macmillan, a Munich judge on Monday granted injunctions against illegal posting or sharing of online book files by two websites. Library.nu is alleged to have posted links to hundreds of thousands of illegal PDF copies of books since December 2010, Ed McCoyd, an attorney for the Association of American Publishers, told The Huffington Post. The majority of these uploads allegedly went through the website iFile.it, he said.
The coordinated legal action came after seven months of private investigation and was led by a German publishing association, Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, and the International Publishers Association.

The Munich court served Library.nu and iFile.it 17 separate injunctions, representing 10 book titles from each of the publishers. One of the injunctions, which The Huffington Post viewed in a translation from the original German, states that every Web link -- either on iFile.it or Library.nu -- leading to an illegal online copy of one of the named books would result in a fine of 250,000 euros or as much as six months in jail.-- from the Huffington Post, which gives more detail. See also The Verge, Indie Bookspot, etc.

The maxium fine would thus be 17 publishers x 10 books x $250,000 = $42,500,000. 

Instead of going after the library.nu guys, the publishers' coalition should have hired them, and monetized the site as a subscription service for e-books, like iTunes for music.  Shortsighted publishers, locked into yesterday's world-view, a discipline-and-punish approach, and an eagerness for excessive profit.  Predictably enough, the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels is amongst the strongest supporters of the pernicious and controversial ACTA legislation that has been widely opposed in street demonstrations across Europe this year (WikiPedia).

It is particularly hypocritical that in their press release, the publishers' conglomerate cites as the first reason for their action, "the interest of the authors who depend on fair compensation for their work."  Academic authors are routinely exploited by commercial publishers, who drive down royalties to single-figure percentages (normally only paid after the publishers have first recouped their own investment), and impose binding contracts on authors that deny them even the basic right to make a single photocopy of their own work, or to pass on their copyright to their legal heirs after death.  Many academic publishers pay no royalties at all.  If academic publishers wanted to offer authors "fair compensation for their work," they should look to their own practices first.

What has annoyed the publishers most, according to their own statement, is that library.nu earned an estimated ten million dollars in advertising revenue.  The period over which this money was made is not mentioned, and one has to query the method by which this estimate was made.  Nevertheless, if it is even partly true, it provides a stinging indictment of the publishers themselves, that they have not had the imagination or creativity to create a business model that could generate this kind of revenue and share it with their authors.

For example, a service like library.nu could be operated as an educational charity, with subscription revenue being shared between authors and charitable educational purposes like research and writing fellowships.  The platform could be used to advertise hard-copy copies of the PDFs, at prices competing with technologies such as the Expresso Book Machine (1 cent per page).  It is a long-established research finding that the distribution of electronic texts frequently boosts the sales of hard copy editions, especially if the advertising is done right (e.g., here, here, and Michael Hart's 1997 report "Electronic Monographs are Great Advertising").

As one commentator has noted, the library.nu archive, estimated at about 400,000 books, still exists.  You can't put the genie back in the bottle.  The whereabouts of the archive is not easily discovered (I don't know it), but it may be in Russia somewhere.  Suing it's creators will not solve the problem in the longer run.

We need to learn two lessons from this:

1. Anyone systematically archiving in-copyright publications needs to watch out!
2. In the modern, networked world, the true price of a publication is the value to a person of a clean conscience. 
   In principle, all books, films and music are and will be available for free download, for anyone willing to break the law of copyright.  But many people do not wish to live like that, and would willingly pay a reasonable price in order to have a clean conscience.  THAT is the future market value of an electronic cultural asset, not a figure calculated on the basis of production costs, shareholder returns, or authors' royalties.  

So, what is the price of a clean conscience?  It's hard to say, but on a per-book basis, I would say it is quite low.  It seems to me that Netflix has it about right: $7.99 per month in the USA, £5.99 per month in the UK, for unlimited online streamed film watching.  Lovefilm.com in the UK is offering unlimited streamed films at £4.99 per month.  

There are two interesting things about Netflix and Lovefilm's business model.  First, the low prices.  Second, the subscription model.  The subscription gives the company a steady, predictable income from month to month, which is a major gain.  A more-or-less captive group of customers, most of whom will not frequently change their subscriptions.

It has been rumoured for quite a while that Amazon is thinking about a subscription service for downloadable books, and with their Kindle service they certainly have the infrastructure for this.  The kno.com service for academic course books does something along these lines: e-textbooks for about 50% of the hard-copy prices, but with content enrichment (online features for note-taking, etc.).  It's not subscription - nobody is there yet - but it's close.

See also:

• http://e-library-free.blogspot.com/
• http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/2012227143813304790.html

Scribal abbreviation 2

Here's another instance of the same abbreviation from the same scribe, proving HI's conjecture about it being a ring.

Scribal abbreviation in Sanskrit manuscript

Here is an extract from folio 4r of MS Baroda 12489 (includes the Carakasaṃhitā), showing इति iti followed by a ह ha with a loop to the right of the glyph.  A bit like the loop on the syllable ॐ oṃ. This is probably an abbreviation for the phrase इति स्माह भगवानात्रेयः iti smāha bhagavān ātreyaḥ that occurs as the second phrase in most chapters.

Here is the phrase from the next chapter, f.5v of MS Baroda 12489.


Baroda 12489 dates from AD 1816/17.
 
Scribal abbreviations are not as common in Sanskrit manuscripts as they are in medieval European ones.

colophons, names of text portions in Sanskrit manuscripts

I believe that David Pingree introduced the term "post-colophon" into Indian manuscript studies when he wrote his catalogue of the Bodleian Chandra Shum Shere jyotiṣa collection.

Am I right that nobody outside Indological circles (and those influenced by indologists in the last few decades) uses the term "post-colophon"?

Here's a grid of usages:

Key: Pingree (various catalogues, starting 1984)
Tripathi: C. Tripathi, Cat. of Jaina MSS at Strasbourg
Wikipedia: see here and links.
X: no special term


Description      Pingree       Tripathi         Wikipedia (and non-indologists)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Final verse
of text                       X                     X              explicit

iti...samāptam        colophon      colophon       X (or colophon?)

saṃvat phrase       post-            Scribal           colophon
                               colophon       Remarks

after saṃvat
phrase                    X                  post-             X
                                                     colophon

 

Pratapaditya Pal uses "post-colophon" in his 1978 Arts of Nepal book
(http://tinyurl.com/37n8f2z), in the same sense as Pingree.  Perhaps
that's where David got it?

Copyright and Open Access

[Links updated 2018]

Never sign away the copyright of your own writings.  Instead, grant the publisher a license that gives them what they want, and assigns to you the rights that you want.  Here are such licenses, in several languages:

• https://web.archive.org/web/20170704083507/http://copyrighttoolbox.surf.nl/copyrighttoolbox/authors/licence/

For background on the Zwolle principles, see here:

• http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/crews/01crews.html
• http://copyright.surf.nl/copyright/zwolle_principles.php (fetched from the waybackmachine)

and see also the SURF initiative, on Copyright Management for Scholarship:

• http://copyright.surf.nl/copyright/ (fetched from the waybackmachine)

[Added 2018:]

• Author Rights & the SPARC Author Addendum

ibus bug fix

Typing Sanskrit in Ubuntu Linux is normally very convenient, using the built-in ibus and m17n systems.  You can write देवनागरी or romanisation (devanāgarī) with just a switch of the keyboard input method. (Thansiang's input method for romanisation input is effective and convenient, but has to be added manually because it isn't included in the main m17n distribution.)

However, with the update to Ubuntu 11.10 in October 2011, a bug was introduced that spoiled typing for several Asian languages, for users of the standard Ubuntu Unity and Gnome windows managers.  The symptom was that as you typed a space, the letters around the cursor jumped into the wrong order. 

The November solution by fujiwarat fixed things.  But it hasn't yet made its way into the standard Ubuntu updates.  At the time of writing, you have to update your ibus installation to version 1.4.0 manually. One way to do it is here, kindly provided by Alex Lee.

March 2012 Update (gnome-shell)

Brandon Schaefer has fixed this ibus/unity bug (thanks!), but the fix will only be released in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Panglin.  Schaefer asks Oneiric users to wait a couple of months, since,

The changes would be to large and would require changes 

in both unityand nux. 

This is good for the future, but isn't great news for anyone who needs to type in an Asian language during the next two months.

And since ibus and the patch have moved along since the posting above, on 14 Jan, Alex Lee's instructions don't work any more.

The deb files that I made for myself in January, following Alex Lee's instructions are available here for a few months:

•  ibus1.4.0 for Oneiric 

Fetch the six files, put them in a directory, and run the following two commands in a terminal, in the directory containing the deb files:

• sudo apt-get remove ibus 
• sudo dpkg -i *.deb
• sudo apt-get install m17n

Log out and in for good measure, though it may not always be necessary.

Hope it works for you.  No guarantees, and no further help available from me, I'm afraid.   There has been a post suggesting that this does not work under unity (see here).  More testing required.  But it works fine for me under gnome-shell, and probably the other non-unity interfaces.

April 2012 update

All the above problems are solved in the 12.04 Precise Pangolin release of Ubuntu.  Just go with the defaults.

Furthermore, Pangolin's release now includes the input of Sanskrit roman transliteration as standard, using the IAST standard.  It's very nice.