Human interfaces

“Because I believe interfaces to government can be simple, beautiful, and easy to use.”

-- Jen Pahlka, via Tim O'Reilly's blog.

Sanskrit manuscripts lost with the Titanic

Adheesh Sathaye mentioned today that the terrible sinking of the Titanic in 1912 was also the occasion of the loss of fourteen Sanskrit manuscripts of the Vikramacarita.  The MSS were on their way from Bombay to Edgerton in the USA.

Here is Edgerton's account, also kindly supplied by Adheesh.

There's an uncomfortable ambiguity in Edgerton's prose, regarding the predicate of his expression "terrible disaster."

Kenney on the poor success-rate of editorial conjectures

I cite this page of Kenney's The Classical Text often, partly in my own mind, and partly to friends and colleagues.  So I thought I'd reproduce it here.

The point being, be careful with conjectures, and remain sanguine that - if it is ever possible to check - over 95% of your conjectures will be wrong.

-----

• Dawe, Repertory.
• Boeckh
• Madvig, Adversaria.

Checklist of things to do on reinstalling Ubuntu

I'm finally moving to 64 bit Linux (since all my machines are fine with that).  My disks have my /home and root files in different partitions, so I can erase and reinstall Linux itself without touching any of "my" files.  This works flawlessly, and the new installation comes up with all my old desktop settings etc.  Since the Ubuntu Software Center's "sync" function still doesn't work properly, here are some installations and customizations that I like:

"ucgadkw" and UCL

Dear colleagues,

For about 25 years I had an email account at University College London.  It was "ucgadkw@euclid.ucl.ac.uk" from 1988, and then "ucgadkw@ucl.ac.uk" with aliases to "wujastyk@ucl.ac.uk" and "d.wujastyk@ucl.ac.uk".  After leaving UCL in 2009 I was given honorary status, so the accounts continued, as did access to my filestore, that for many years was the INDOLOGY website. 

But that has all now been unplugged and switched off. I was not informed or warned about this, and a UCL computer support person has just told me that it is unlikely that I'll be given access to my old files because apparently they don't belong to me, but to UCL ("work for hire").  I have a backup, but it is slightly out of date.

There's obviously a lesson here: if you care about your work, don't store it exclusively on a university computer.  Strange thing to say, but unfortunately true. 

Minimal example of XeLaTeX with Velthuis input mapping

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{polyglossia}

\newfontfamily
  \sanskritfont [Script=Devanagari,Mapping=velthuis-sanskrit]{Sanskrit 2003}

\begin{document}

\sanskritfont
\noindent\huge

aasiidraajaa nalo naama viirasenasuto balii|\\
upapannairgu.nairi.s.tai ruupavaana"svakovida.h||

\end{document}

Resources for OA book publication

My post "Some OA journals that publish S-Asia related research," was self-evidently devoted to journals.

There is also a growing field of services for publishing OA books.  Some research funding agencies, such as the FWF in Austria, require contractually that books too should be published OA.  To me, the business model for OA book publishing is less clear than that for journals, and I see many difficulties.  Nevertheless, the field is growing.

Some resources:

• Directory of Open Access Books
  
  "The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact."
• Knowledge Unlatched
  
  "Knowledge Unlatched is a not-for-profit organisation committed to helping global communities share the costs of Open Access publishing so that good books continue to be published and more readers are able to engage with them."
• Open Humanities Press
  
  "The basic idea is simple: making peer-reviewed literature permanently available, free of charge and freely redistributable by taking advantage of the low cost and wide access of internet distribution." ... "After looking at the various efforts underway, we concluded that an editorially-driven international press, focused on building respect through its brand, is what is required to tackle the digital 'credibility' problem. With OHP, we aim to emulate the strengths and flexibility of commercial presses, while avoiding the institutional limitations of the university-based e-presses."
• Open Edition
  
  "OpenEdition is the umbrella portal for OpenEdition Books, Revues.org, Hypotheses and Calenda, four platforms dedicated to electronic resources in the humanities and social sciences."
• Open Edition Books
  
  "OpenEdition Books est une plateforme de livres en sciences humaines et sociales. Plus de la moitié d'entre eux est en libre accès. Des services complémentaires sont proposés via les bibliothèques et institutions abonnées."
• Open Access Publishing European Network
  
  "Online library and publication platform.  The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences. OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality controlled collection of Open Access books, and provides services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of dissemination, quality assurance and digital preservation."

Where's that Book? On the physical locations of knowledge

Many years ago, my then wife – whose academic specialism was similar to my own – decided that it would make sense to merge our book collections. When I got home from work, our two libraries had been unified, and arranged alphabetically by author. I experienced this as a negative change, I felt lost, ignorant, almost lobotomized. I took the rearrangement as an act of mild aggression, although I admitted freely that this was not at all my wife's intention. From her point of view, she was making it easier for both of us to access our complementary book collections. She was being tidy, logical, orderly. From my point of view, I had lost the ready mental association of book with spatial location, that was integral to the way I habitually remembered references.

For me, the act of remembering academic matters often goes as a rapid internal dialogue, something like this: “Ah yes! So-and-so said something about this. Now what was it exactly? Hmm.” Then I would turn from my desk towards the shelves, thinking, “With the books on topic X. Top right, at about eye-level.” In my mind's eye, my attention roams to the spot on the wall where the book was located. Then I would get up, fetch the book, and find the passage I was after.
In my spatial memory, the phrase “books on topic X” need not actually refer to a subject location. It could be books of a certain colour, especially if a series were all printed in the same style of binding. Or books of a certain size, or that I bought or was given at a certain time. The arrangement of books on my shelves was – and is again – mostly subject-wise, but there are exceptions. But this doesn't affect my ability to remember spatially where books are. As long as the books are where I put them in the first place, then I can rapidly and efficiently find them again. 

The distress I experienced when the books were put into somebody else's logical order was a very real reduction in cognitive power.

I have experienced this several times since then, especially when moving house or office. Physically displacing my personal book collection results in a loss of bibliographical and cognitive control. That control is never quite recovered, in spite of attempts to reproduce the original arrangement of the books. Such a rearrangement is never quite possible. This is partly because the layout of the new storage space does not lend itself to reproducing the original ordering. But also because one's physical resources of energy and time do not allow for a full recovery of the original arrangement.

All this raises the broader question of books, locations, and memory. My own method of relating cognitively to my books is, I suppose, a pale version of the famous medieval European concept of the Theatre of Memory, so eloquently described by Frances Yates. [At this point, I recall that the Yates book is at above head-level on the second column of books in the next room. I fetch it, and write out the bibliographical information for the following footnote.]1
Further points for development:

• On moving libraries, the Kern Library.
• What is lost, what is gained.
• Open access versus closed access.

---

1 Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London, ARK Paperbacks, 1984). First published in 1966.

Reflections on translation from Sanskrit

The following was written by me in another context, as part of a conversation.  I'm reproducing it here in case it is of general interest:

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.

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/

TeX implementations in the Cloud

The more mature products (2014)

• ShareLaTeX
  XeLaTeX and pdfLaTeX, biber and biblatex.
  Based on the most recent TeXLive.
  • Open-source version of ShareLaTeX for self-installation.
• Overleaf (formerly WriteLaTeX)
  XeLaTeX supported since March 2014.
  Based on the most recent TeXlive.

Both the above have collaborative-editing features.  Both have free access for limited projects, but require subscription for larger projects or collaborative teams.

Others of varying levels of activity (2014)

• FlyLaTeX (self-hosting; free and open-source)
• TeXTouch (iTunes, iPhone editor, can compile when online)
• Verbosus (with Android and iOS apps)
• Blue Publications
• LaTeXLab - requires your Google login details :-( 
• Pine from Sayahna.orgIn alpha test (a document processing system in the cloud that makes use of MediaWiki and its resources)
• CloudTeX from Sayahna.org
  XeLaTeX and LuaTeX supported.   Working prototype available to testers. 
• A different CloudTeX Seems to have gone quiet as of 2013.
• SpanDex
  XeLaTeX and LuaTeX available, but limited Unicode fonts. Closed.
• ScribTeX  (phased out as of Feb 2013, in favour of ShareLaTeX, but still exists)
• MonkeyTeX (4/2014)

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.

Copyright changes: updates

Changes may be afoot in the realm of academic copyright.  For a note about the situation in the UK and continental Europe, see the note in ALCS News, January 2013. 

See also Digital Opportunity: A Review of Intellectual Property and Growth, the  independent report by Professor Ian Hargreaves (2011).  Table of contents:

Foreword by Ian Hargreaves     01   
Executive Summary     03
Chapter 1 Intellectual Property and Growth     10
Chapter 2 The Evidence Base     16
Chapter 3 The International Context     21
Chapter 4 Copyright Licensing: a Moment of Opportunity     26
Chapter 5 Copyright: Exceptions for the Digital Age     41
Chapter 6 Patents     53
Chapter 7 Designs     64
Chapter 8 Enforcement and Disputes     67
Chapter 9 SMEs and the IP Framework     86
Chapter 10 An Adaptive IP Framework      91
Chapter 11 Impact     97
Annex A Terms of Reference     101
Annex B Stakeholders Met during Review of IP and Growth     102
Annex C Call for Evidence Submissions     105
Annex D List of Supporting Documents     

Reservations about Coult

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 11:02 AM
Subject: Re: TO: vaccination historians FROM: Arthur Boylston
To: John Buder <johnbuder@gmail.com>


Dear John,
Many thanks for attaching the Boylston article. 

Boylston says (2012: 4),

Conclusions
There are two unequivocal accounts of inoculation in the middle of the 16th century, one Chinese and one Indian, and each gives a specific place and name to the initial inoculators. Whether it was in use before about 1550 is entirely speculative.

The account of Coult isn't "unequivocal" I'm afraid.  Coult says that he has been told that inoculation has been known in Bengal for 150 years, "as near as I can learn."  This is vague.

Then he says that Brahmana records give the first Indian inoculator as "Dununtary."  This is a version of the Sanskrit name that is scientifically transliterated as "Dhanvantari" or in Devanagari as "धन्वन्तरि".  This is the name of a mythological progenitor of the science of medicine.  This assertion is equivalent to claiming, say, that Aesclepius did inoculation.  It cannot be taken at face value as historical evidence, and should be treated as an appeal to a mythological past age by someone who assumed that the ancient sages knew all of medical science.

Coult, writing in Calcutta, placed Dununtary in Champanagar: "a physician of Champanager, a small town by the side of the Ganges about half way to Cossimbazar."  This can't be a place in Bihar.  It has to be somewhere north of Calcutta.  Cossimbazar is in the northern outskirts of modern Berhampur.  So we're looking for a place that used to be called Champanagar, and is somewhere round about Ranaghat, Santipur, Nabadwip or Plassey (as in, "battle of").  Wherever this Champanagar is, if it's between Calcutta and Cossimbazar, it's in Bengal. 

The trouble is, Campanagar (Campā, Campānagara, Campāpura, etc) is normally a reference to the well-known place in Bihar, as Boylston assumes.  I think it's most likely that Coult is wrong about something.  Either he's wrong about the name "Champanagar" or he's wrong in locating it between Calcutta and Cossimbazar.   But the whole thing's moot, really, since Dhanvantari is a mythical character.

With Robert Coult, in 1731, we apparently have a real witness, and a fairly early one.  But before relying on Coult's report, which we get through Dharampal, I would feel more comfortable having eyes-on confirmation of the Coult document.  Years ago, I tried to follow Dharampal's references to the Coult document, but I drew a blank.  Dharampal says, "It is on ff.271v-272r in Add Ms. 4432 amongst the Royal Society papers in the British Museum."  Now, things are easier because of the internet and the BL's cataloguing.  This reference takes us to item 44 in Add MS 4432.  Could someone who lives in Bloomsbury go and look at the Coult document and get confirmation of it's content?  It's important, since it is our earliest dated account of inoculation in India.  Dharampal was a good scholar, but it would be good to see the original document.

Ralph W. Nicholas's book Fruits of Worship: Practical Religion in Bengal, (2003), pp. 172-177, gives a good survey of the early sources, and refers to the European accounts from the 18th century onwards, Coult's (again from Dharampal), Hollwell's, and others.

I would not say that we have historical evidence for inoculation in India before Coult, i.e., early 18th century. 

I have a dim memory from the time I was writing "Pious Fraud" that there was some evidence that sounded worth investigating in early VOC accounts in Dutch.  But I was not able to follow that up at the time.

I've addressed this to you directly; please circulate it as you see fit.

Best,
Dominik

Aśoka: guilt and leadership?

I heard a report on the BBC World Service a couple of days ago of a recent publication by Rebecca Schaumberg et al. in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  It seems that individuals who feel guilt strongly make better leaders, showing significantly more consideration for the welfare of the people they manage. The citation and abstract are below.

It struck me that this fitted the case of King Aśoka pretty well.  Two personal features are particularly prominent in his inscriptions: his guilt following the war in Kalinga, and his paternal concern for the welfare of his subjects.

---

Citation and Abstract

Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown: The link between guilt proneness and leadership.

Schaumberg, Rebecca L.; Flynn, Francis J.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 103(2), Aug 2012, 327-342. doi: 10.1037/a0028127

1. We propose that guilt proneness is a critical characteristic of leaders and find support for this hypothesis across 3 studies. Participants in the first study rated a set of guilt-prone behaviors as more indicative of leadership potential than a set of less guilt-prone behaviors. In a follow-up study, guilt-prone participants in a leaderless group task engaged in more leadership behaviors than did less guilt-prone participants. In a third, and final, study, we move to the field and analyze 360° feedback from a group of young managers working in a range of industries. The results indicate that highly guilt-prone individuals were rated as more capable leaders than less guilt-prone individuals and that a sense of responsibility for others underlies the positive relationship between guilt proneness and leadership evaluations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

A summary of the research is available on the Stanford Business School website.

Publishing in Medical History: The author's view

If I am an author coming to Medical History today, with a view to submitting my article for publication, what can I expect?

Copyright and free, online access

The journal's website has the statement reproduced in the Appendix below (after "Read more>>").  The website used to have CUP's normal "Transfer of Copyright" and OA conditions too, but these appear to have been removed recently (see image right).
Here are the questions I might ask:

1. Will I retain copyright of my article? 
   Normally, yes.  But I may want to give it away.
   • Why would I want to give it away? 
     Because I would like my article to appear on the CUP website AND I would like to pay nothing, AND I would like a "one year subscription embargo period." (I don't know what that means.)
2. Will I have to pay anything?
   Only if you want to.
   
3. Will my article be free for the public to read?
   Yes, always.  All articles will be published online immediately, with Open Access, on the PMC website.
4. Will my article be published online, Open Access, online, immediately on the CUP website? 
   Only if I pay $675.  And in this case, I probably have to give up my copyright.
   • Why would I do that?Because then my article will enjoy the added benefits of being on the CUP website.

Creative Commons licenses

The statement in the Appendix below raises the issue of CC licenses when discussing "Green OA."  What is a CC license?  It's all explained in baby language at http://creativecommons.org/.
  
When you write something original, you automatically own the copyright of it.  And as such, nobody is allowed to copy your article without your permission.  
But what if you want people to copy your work, say from your website, while still respecting your authorship?  You want to give away some of your rights, but not all of them.

That's where the CC licenses come in.  They say, in effect, "I own the copyright, buster, so watch out.  But in advance, I give you certain rights, and here they are. ..."

bottom of page one.

As long as you still own the copyright, you are free to add one of these CC licenses to your article, stipulating exactly what others may or may not do with your article.  Here (right) is one I prepared earlier.  In this case, I've chosen the license that says that people using my article have to state that I wrote it (attribution), they can't sell it (non-commercial), and they can tweak or remix or build upon my article, as long as they release the new work under an identical license (share-alike).
What CUP says in the OA Options document below is that if you go for the Gold OA option, and pay CUP $675, your article will be published free, online immediately, with a Creative Commons license.  What isn't made explicit is that CUP wants you to transfer your copyright to them, and the CC license will be issued by them, not you.
Let me repeat that for the hard-of-hearing: if you pay CUP, they will relieve you of your copyright.
They will then release your work with a CC license of their choosing.
I am basing the above on the copyright forms that are normally issued by CUP for authors who choose Green OA, for example the form for Modern Asian Studies.  There seem to be different "Transfer of Copyright" forms for each journal that CUP publishes.  Sometimes the copyrights are transferred to the society or college behind the journal (SOAS, RAS), at other times the rights are transferred to CUP (as with the transfer forms that were on the MH website, but have now been removed).  As far as I have seen, copyright is in every case taken away from the author.