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:
!
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Tuesday, April 02, 2013
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
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
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:
For Radhakrishnan's continuing comments on TeX4ht development, see
TeX4ht's homepage:
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.)
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
TeX4ht's homepage:
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Some OA journals that publish S-Asia related research
And see the India-related list that used to be maintained by Scholars Without Borders (mostly science and medicine):
Saying that a journal is OA still leaves some critical questions unanswered. E.g.,
- Is there a "going in" fee, or Article Processing Fee (APF)?
One of the items in the list above charges $300. Several of the big houses like Brill, Elsevier and Springer will also publish your article as OA, even in an otherwise non-OA journal, if you pay them enough. Their APF prices are typically $3000 (Springer, Elsevier). I am not interested in including such journals in the list above, as I consider anything above $300-500 to be profiteering. APFs of $300-500 are typical of some even very large OA publishers like Hindawi, proving that this is a valid business model.
Quite apart from my personal view, I do not think APF fees of $3000 meet most people's normal expectation of the meaning of an Open Access journal. As South Asianists, we are interested in access for both readers and authors in countries where scholars are relatively poor. A high APF mutes less wealthy authors. As such, both Gratis OA (also called "Diamond OA") and low or zero APFs are indexes of relevance. - Copyright: being OA means that whoever owns the copyright has given permission for the article to be disseminated at zero cost. But it doesn't say anything about who owns the copyright of the article. Many OA journals allow the authors to retain copyright, but not all.
- Is the journal online-only, or both online and in print?
- The online version is free by definition, but the print issues would usually cost something. How much?
- Is the journal indexed by the main global indexing services?
- Is the journal peer-reviewed? Strongly or weakly?
More distinctions (e.g., Gratis OA (free of price) and Libre OA (free of price and rights restrictions)) and discussion in Wikipedia (consulted 13 Feb 2012). The Sherpa/Romeo website helps with some of this.
I'm putting some indicators in parentheses after the journal title, for those cases where I can find out the information without correspondence.
It is often hard to find out these facts from the journals' websites. This suggests to me that for some of the editors, the various business models of OA publishing are not always well understood.
[2022-11: I keep the above list up to date as I hear of new journals. But some of the work of this blog post has now been superseded by FOASAS.]
---
*APF = Article Processing Fee, a fee that the publisher charges the author or the author's institution for publication in the Open Access journal. See discussion in Wikipedia (consulted 12 Feb 2012).
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
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.
SpanDexClosed.
XeLaTeX and LuaTeX available, but limited Unicode fonts.- ScribTeX (phased out as of Feb 2013, in favour of ShareLaTeX, but still exists)
MonkeyTeX (4/2014)
Monday, January 21, 2013
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.
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.
- 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.
- 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. - 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:
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
Tuesday, November 06, 2012
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),
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
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,
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
Friday, November 02, 2012
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
- 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)
Saturday, August 04, 2012
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?
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:
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. ..."
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.
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:
- 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.)
- Why would I want to give it away?
- Will I have to pay anything?
Only if you want to. - 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. - 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. |
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. |
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