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.

CUP corrects the copyright statement on MH back issues

True to their word, as reported yesterday, CUP has now corrected the copyright statements attached to the back-issues of articles from the journal Medical History.  This recognizes the fact that the copyright of these articles belongs to their authors.

I'm still not sure that it's right to say "Published by Cambridge University Press."  I believe my article was published by University College London, who were the publishers of the journal at the time my article was published in 2007.  Nor is the "published online 17 May 2012" right, since it was published online in 2007 by PMC.  I hope that these issues can also be straightened out.

Current article also (C) its author.

 To my surprise, this change in copyright statement now also applies to articles published this year, 2012, during the period since CUP has taken over the journal.  As mentioned in earlier blogs, the documentation on the CUP pages says clearly that OUP will take possession of the copyright of all articles, whether published Open or Closed Access. Do we have a glitch, or a genuine new policy here?