News from the Collective – Page 38 – Radical Open Access Collective

Open Book Publishers

The End of the World: ten years later

By Maria Manuel Lisboa

Who would have thought that a book about the end of the world would feel of such relevance some ten years down the line?

The answer to this question is, who wouldn’t? Fear of widespread calamity has been part of the human psyche ever since whatever the human psyche is came into being, through the tortuous pathways of evolution. And the urge to articulate that fear is at the heart of our most ancient narratives, from the Flood in the Old Testament to the squabble between Aesir and Loki in Ragnarok, to the Kali Yuga in Hindu mysticism. Without that fear, would anyone believe in God? In the beginning we were all atheists.

When I published The End of the World: Apocalypse and its Aftermath in Western Culture in 2011, I looked at the many instances in which literature, art and more recently (comparatively speaking) film have returned to the idea and fear of global annihilation. A bit like repeatedly probing a loose tooth with one’s tongue: it doesn’t help and it hurts a bit, but we can’t help ourselves.

In my book I looked at instances of imagined planetary destruction originating from many causes, from human recklessness to environmental calamity to sheer bad luck. The reassurance to be drawn from the fact that, in the original ancient Greek, the term ‘apocalypse’ signals a necessary clearing of the decks before a new beginning is of the cold comfort variety. In the global wipe-out that supposedly opens the way for a better world, most people die. In a nuclear age, in which the power of science in its negative permutations (weapons of mass destruction, biological warfare, etc.) combines with world travel seen as a both a necessity and an entitlement (where would we be without our professional networking and our regular holidays in the sun?), the conditions for triggering calamity are firmly in place.

There are always, of course, two or more sides to every equation: from the point of view of a travel-averse person, I observe the often unnecessary globe-trotting of academics and the obsession with foreign holidays that now crosses social-class boundaries like nothing else, and I purse my lips sanctimoniously at the self-indulgent burning of fossil fuels, environmental harm and the facilitation of pandemics triggered by unnecessary air travel. On the other hand, with any luck, the more we see of the world and get to know others (or Others), the less inclined we might be to destroy it and them, and instead help out if the need arises.

When Pandora’s box was opened, unleashing havoc upon the world, the only thing left inside it was hope. Long may that thought endure.

The End of the World: Apocalypse and its Aftermath in Western Culture by Maria Manuel Lisboa can be read and downloaded freely here.

Open Book Publishers

Open books from OBP: A showcase

The importance of freely available, openly accessible academic books is more evident now than ever. During the current crisis, we have been looking for ways to let people know about the availability of open resources: free to access, with no institutional membership required, now and always.

As part of this effort, we asked our authors to send us a few lines about the Open Access books they have written and published with us. The brief was very wide: authors could write whatever they liked about their book and why a reader might want to (digitally) pick it up. The posts below are their generous responses to this request.

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Alessandra Capodacqua

As a professor of photography at NYU Florence, since the late 90s, I have had the privilege to research the Acton Photograph Archive collection housed at the campus, which is a 37-acre estate, with olive groves and gardens, five villas that provide a home to the university and include Villa La Pietra with its house museum, and formal gardens. In more recent years I have become more involved and interested in the rich presence of photographs of women in the above-mentioned Archive, and how these photographs convey not only interesting sub-textual information about the period - the property was acquired by the Acton-Mitchell family in 1907 - but also social, political and cultural contexts: the fashion, lifestyle and influences. This interest lead me to research the Archive in more depth, and this resulted in a lecture and my contribution to the publication Women and Migration.

Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History, ed. by Deborah Willis, Ellyn Toscano and Kalia Brooks Nelson (2019) is free to read and download.

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J. David Velleman

As of next month, almost all of my life’s work will be available in open access volumes — two volumes originally published in OA format by Open Book Publishers, and two converted from print to OA by MPublishing at the University of Michigan. I also co-founded and co-edit Philosophers’ Imprint, the first open-access journal in philosophy. Why do I believe in the open-access movement?

The movement has two main aims: (1) to make academic research available to a wider audience and (2) to spare academic institutions from having to pay additional charges for research they have already paid to produce, referee, and edit. Unfortunately, for-profit publishers have succeeded in co-opting the term ‘open access” for online publication that serves the first goal but not the second, because they levy excessive charges on authors — or, more precisely, their funders -- to make their work openly accessible online. In a world where the very existence of higher-education is threatened by lack of funds, this ploy is a direct attack on the academy.

To authors who have not yet switched to publishing in genuinely open-access form, I would point out that my open-access publications have garnered far more readers, from far more countries, than anything I have published in print, and they have done so at minimal or no cost to me or my institution.

J David Velleman's books,Beyond Price: Essays on Birth and Death (2015), and Foundations for Moral Relativism: Second Expanded Edition (2015) are free to read and download.

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Robert Kolker

This is a good time (if this time can be called ‘good’) to catch up on films you’ve been wanting to see. The Altering Eye is an excellent guide to the golden age of postwar international cinema from Italian neorealism to Brazilian cinema novo. Many of the films discussed in the book are available for streaming, especially on the Criterion Channel in the U.S.

The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema by Robert Kolker (2009) is free to read and download.

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Andrew Fisher

Ethics for A-Level does what it says on the tin. The expense and lumpy quality of introductory books on ethics is astounding. We wanted to give a student/teacher/academic/parent assurance and confidence that all the key material needed to tackle the Ethics A-Level was of the highest quality, in one place, and free. The book is split into discrete sections, includes loads of examples, and so isn't overly demanding. It has useful questions to guide study and links to further resources. If people want to revise, learn, prepare lessons, or are just interested in ethics then we believe this is the best gateway to the debates - and did we mention, it's free?

Ethics for A-Level by Mark Dimmock and Andrew Fisher (2017) is free to read and download.

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Maurice Wolfthal

I chose to translate Bernard Weinstein's Di yidishe yunyons in amerike; bleter geshikhte un erinerungn [The Jewish Unions in America: Pages of History and Memories] because labor history has largely vanished from American schools and universities, and it is vitally important to remember the history of those who work for a living, including Jewish workers.

I translated Nokhem Shtif's Pogromen in Ukrayne: did tsayt fun der frayviliger armey [The Pogroms in Ukraine 1918-19: Prelude to the Holocaust] because it sheds light on the vicious antisemitic stereotypes that fueled those atrocities, inspired the rise of Nazism, and are fueling the resurgence of antisemitic violence in Europe and the United States today.

The Jewish Unions in America: Pages of History and Memories by Bernard Weinstein, and The Pogroms in Ukraine 1918-19: Prelude to the Holocaust by Nokhem Shtif, both translated by Maurice Wolfthal (2018 and 2019), are free to read and download.

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Agner Fog

This book explores how our collective response to fears and dangers has deep evolutionary roots - and how it has a profound influence on politics. It draws on many different fields of both the social sciences and the natural sciences, and examines issues of war and peace, the rise and fall of empires, the mass media, economic instability, ecological crisis, and much more.

Warlike and Peaceful Societies: The Interaction of Genes and Culture by Agner Fog (2017) is free to read and download.

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David Weissman

The coronavirus disrupts and destroys many things. It also inverts ordinary relations. Cooperation is one of those. It usually requires partnerships that satisfy shared interests or needs, in work or friendship. Each partner has a role, all the roles need be satisfied if the task at hand (raising children, driving safely in traffic) is to be accomplished. Managing the virus alters this paradigm. For now, we cooperate by cutting our relations to other people, staying home to avert sickening others or ourselves.

This is autonomy as it enables cooperation. The trees of a copse or wood are an analogue. Each tree is a node; it has effects on the many things dependent on it when living in or under its branches and foliage. Yet each tree depends in turn on the ecosystem established by the array of trees. Do we emphasize individual trees or the system they form when speaking of a copse? An adequate account requires both. So does our isolation imply the greater good of the society we work to preserve.

Agency: Moral Identity and Free Will by David Weissman (2020) is free to read and download.

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Ruth Finnegan

“Shall I quote you?

N-no ...

I’d rather YOU quoted ME.

But you’ll only do it with full understanding if you look first at this

and this:

Why Do We Quote? The Culture and History of Quotation by Ruth Finnegan (2011) is free to read and download.”

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Catrione Seth and Rotraud von Kulessa

Faced with the current pandemic, borders are being reinforced all over Europe. Rather than thinking of a common strategy to fight the virus which threatens us all in the same manner, countries are retreating behind the banner of national sovereignty; threats are seen as located outside one’s own territory; a post-pandemic return to the Schengen area seems unthinkable at this stage. More than ever it is worth reflecting on the European project as envisaged by Enlightenment thinkers. See for instance ‘Europe without frontiers’ by Masson de Pezay (extract 74 in the book).

Face à la pandémie actuelle, nous pouvons observer le retour aux frontières à l’intérieur de l’Europe. Au lieu de penser à une stratégie commune pour combattre le virus qui nous menace tous de la même manière, chaque pays se retranche derrière la souveraineté nationale; on définit des zones à risques en dehors du propre pays, et un retour à l’espace Schengen semble désormais hors de portée. En ces temps-ci, il nous semble d’autant plus important de rappeler à tous l’importance du projet européen, déjà reconnue par les penseur(e)s du 18e siècle. Article recommandé 74. L’Europe sans frontières (Alexandre-Frédéric- Jacques de Masson de Pezay, Les soirées Helvétiennes, Alsaciennes et Franc-Comtoises, 1771), p. 142.

Angesichts der aktuellen Bedrohung durch die Pandemie lässt sich in Europa eine Rückkehr zu den Grenzen beobachten. Anstatt an einer gemeinsamen Strategie zu arbeiten, um das Virus und seine Folgen zu bekämpfen, bzw. gemeinsame Ausstiegsstrategien aus dem Shutdown zu entwickeln, verschanzen sich die Länder Europas hinter ihrer nationalen Souveränität, und eine Rückkehr zu Schengen scheint erst einmal nicht in Aussicht. Deshalb ist es umso wichtiger an die Bedeutung des europäischen Projektes zu erinnern, wie es nicht zuletzt von den Gelehrten der Aufklärung anerkannt war. S. Artikel 74 : Europa ohne Grenzen.

The Idea of Europe: Enlightenment Perspectives (2017), L’idée de l’Europe au Siècle des Lumières (2017) and Die Europaidee im Zeitalter der Aufklärung (2017), all edited by Catrione Seth and Rotraud von Kulessa, are all free to read and download.

For a list of other platforms and presses that publish Open Access books (and a few resources for journals too) click here.

Open Book Publishers

Coronavirus, inequality and the ‘tipping point’

T.S. Eliot, in his high modernist poem The Wasteland, declared April to be ‘the cruellest month’. In April 2020, as the Covid-19 crisis unfolds across the UK, the cruelty of social inequality is indeed exposed more than ever. Some who are having to self-isolate and quarantine themselves will do so in houses that are a pleasure to reside in, with feelings of security and warmth. Millions however will do so in circumstances that are quite different.

After more than a decade of ‘austerity’ in government spending, and even after it is supposed to have ended as the dominant mode of government fiscal policy, savage inequalities cut deep into British society.

Putting to one side for a moment the threat to life that the coronavirus has brought, we can imagine the quite different experiences of the emergency at either end of the UK’s social spectrum. The already affluent, who have done so well over this last decade, occupy themselves during this pandemic in comfortable homes with baking, gardening, ‘Zoom-socialising’ with friends and family and catching up with reading. However, those who have over this same time struggled to make ends meet and to support their families on low incomes, are pushed into various kinds of family and personal crisis.

In Just Managing: What it Means for the Families of Austerity Britain, families talked about their sub-standard housing conditions and homes that were cold, damp and otherwise poorly maintained by negligent landlords. They talked about lack of amenities and outlets for their children, and the difficulties caused by overcrowded living spaces. For all of these families, representative of millions in their position, the fact of having to rent in the private sector because of the impossibility of accessing social housing, meant living with constant worries about eviction and homelessness. Now, for these types of families, coronavirus has made already stressful and precarious lives even more stressful and precarious. New languages will not be learnt, classics will not be read and new interests will not be discovered. Rather the struggle to survive will become more intense than ever.

In the context of this public health emergency, ‘survival’ now of course has a direct and literal meaning. Here we do come to the matter of the threat to life, and here we are not ‘all in this together’. For workers on the lowest wages and with the most insecure types of employment, the risks of encountering this deadly virus are inordinately greater than they are for the better-off in society. Many have come under pressure to continue to go to work in workplaces that make proper social-distancing simply impossible, despite being in ‘non-essential’ occupations. They are more likely also to have to use public transport to get to those places of work with long commutes. These working people are school staff, health workers, agency cleaners, transport workers, logistics workers, supermarket workers, postal workers, etc. Amongst the poorest, pre-existing poor health is also more likely to be a concern. This virus was not created by social inequality; however, social inequality is now its ‘sinister aid’, helping it to take lives as it cuts its vicious and deadly path through communities.

Our book ended with these words:

The merchants of austerity should take note. It is not just family stability that can be ‘tipped’. So too can the willingness of those who are just managing to put up with it all.

When we wrote these words, we could not have imagined they would become a matter of life and death for thousands of working people living in the most compromised of circumstances. However, they have become more relevant than ever – and brutally so.

Mark O'Brien and Paul Kyprianou's Just Managing? What it Means for the Families of Austerity Britain can be read and downloaded freely here.

Open Book Publishers

Agency: Moral Identity and Free Will

by David Weissman

Agency is fundamental to everything we are and do. Thinking, doing, and making—Aristotle’s triad of generic activities—imply it. Yet two reasons thwart inquiries that would make it the focus of inquiry. One is the difficulty of understanding a condition presupposed by the activity of specifying it: we examine ourselves while considering this fundamental aspect of our being. Another is a complex of disputes that obscure this elementary issue.

Agency: Free Will and Moral Identity reduces confusion by emphasizing five principal oppositions. The first—Cartesian subjectivism, or the Aristotelian idea that we live and move amidst other people and things—determines one’s reading of the other four: what are the bases for personal autonomy; how is autonomy constrained by socialization; do we have free will; are choice and action perpetually inhibited by self-appraisal; how is moral identity anchored in free will? Agency’s responses are clarifying:

Are we agents engaged by other people and things, or is consciousness of them the occasion for thinking of ourselves?

Descartes emphasized that nothing is better known to minds than minds inspecting and appraising themselves. Aristotle emphasized the thinking, doing, and making of agents engaging other people and things. Agency’s perspective is the one of Aristotle and C.S. Peirce.

Do we have autonomy sufficient to determine the manner and trajectory of our actions; or is each of us the creature of his or her social conditions, hence the clone of every person shaped by them?

Autonomy is socialized. We live and act among others while constrained by a common language, practices, loyalties, and laws. Free will satisfies a discipline: we usually make ourselves responsible for choices that satisfy those limits.

Does each person have free will, or is every choice and action determined by a lineage of causes that reaches back to the origins of time? There is no responsibility for one’s actions and effects if free choice is illusory because a causal tide has determined one’s every response.

Agency without free will implies that each of us is a vessel for the causal energies and vectors of one’s antecedents. Arguments for and against this view are hundreds of years old, but they embody a nest of assumptions that are usually unexamined. Is nature to be construed holistically so everything is related, directly or mediately, to everything else? Assume their independence, then imagine that Jack and Jill surprise one another as each accommodates the other, experimenting as they test one another. We‘re surprised by situations for which we have no prior experience; we’re altered by information that changes old values or assumptions. The discussion is often conceptual, though determining variables in the case of free will are Darwinian, empirical, and evolutionary.

Does one sometimes act freely and responsibly because of his or her character, calculations, and aims, or is appraisal a steady brake on action because imagination and choice are perpetually inhibited by the fear of violating personal or social scruples?

Autonomy is situated. Everything we do has constraining norms and causes sufficient to produce it , but some of norms ae one’s own: we freely satisfy and sometimes violate or exceed them. This isn’t freedom without limits; it is a permission like Mill’s no-harm principle: do as you like and can up to the point of harming others. There is also this essential corollary: control yourself when you are close to that line.

Is moral identity founded in the personal evolution of one’s character, sensibility, and choices? Or is it the conceit of people who reliably behave as the privilege of their class or caste enables?

Moral identity is the achievement of agents who acquire a distinctive moral voice while satisfying the opposition that pits autonomy against socialization.

The book’s argument is historical and dialectical. Emphasizing interiority, sensibility, and initiative, but also collaborationand duty, it redeems our naïve impression that freedom is more than an illusion.

Agency: Moral Identity and Free Will is an Open Access title. Click here to read and download this title for free.

Open Book Publishers

‘Models in Microeconomic Theory’

by Martin J. Osborne

As an undergraduate, I was fortunate not to learn microeconomic theory from a textbook. Instead, I was privileged to have two wonderful teachers, Frank Hahn and Partha Dasgupta. Frank taught consumer, producer, and general equilibrium theory (our Chapters 4-6 and 10-12), and Partha, in small group tutorials, covered the new developments in economic theory of the early 1970s (including the material in our Section 13.2 and Chapter 14). Both of them refrained from drawing sweeping policy conclusions from the simple models, sparing me from one of the sins of many "Intermediate Micro'' textbooks, where the policy conclusions generally follow from the author's political views, not from any model. They also insisted on precision and rigor in the formulation and analysis of models. Models in Microeconomic Theory embraces these features; if it matches the rigor of Frank's lecture notes and the freshness and energy of Partha's tutorials, I consider it a success.

Terminology colors readers' interpretations of formal statements. To take one example, allocations of resources with the property that no other allocation exists in which everyone is better off used to be called "Pareto optimal". That made it possible for economists to state the result "Every competitive equilibrium is Pareto optimal", which sounds very much like saying that the outcome generated by a market is good as far as human welfare is concerned. In fact, the formal result that underlies this statement has no such implication. Frank Hahn recognized that the term "Pareto optimal" is misleading, writing in his book "General Competitive Analysis" (with Kenneth Arrow) that it "conveys more commendation than the concept should bear" (p. 91) because in some "Pareto optimal" allocations some individuals are very badly off. Indeed, in one Pareto optimal allocation all the resources in the economy are owned by a single individual. (Only an economist would think that the word "optimal" is appropriate for such an allocation.) Arrow and Hahn use the term "Pareto efficient". That is better than "Pareto optimal", but still misleading: the sense in which a competitive equilibrium allocation is "efficient" is very different from the everyday sense of the word. Instead we use the term "Pareto stable": stable, because the set of all individuals cannot collectively deviate to another allocation in which they are all better off. "Every competitive equilibrium is Pareto stable" conveys the content of the result much more accurately than "Every competitive equilibrium is Pareto optimal".

I would like to go further. The model that generates the formal result assumes, importantly, that if the actions of an individual or firm negatively affect someone else then the agent taking the action pays a price for her action, and if the effect is positive then the person on the receiving end of the action pays the perpetrator. That is, all interactions between individuals are mediated by markets. That assumption does not of course fit the world. If you build an ugly house next to mine, you don't pay me for the discomfort it causes me; when a firm pollutes the atmosphere it doesn't compensate consumers for the effects on their health; if I drive on the highway, I don't (generally) compensate you for the delay I add to your trip. In the absence of markets for such interactions, a competitive equilibrium is generally _not_ Pareto stable. Thus my preference is to state the main result of general equilibrium theory as "For almost any economy, no competitive equilibrium is Pareto stable". A subsidiary result is that in the (strange) case of no "external effects", a competitive equilibrium is Pareto stable. I did not succeed in persuading my coauthor to state the results in this way, but in my view those statements accurately encapsulate the main content of the theory.

No engineer bases the design a vehicle on a model of the world without friction. Economists are sometimes more cavalier about drawing conclusions concerning economic policy from simple models. The analysis of formal models may help us understand social and economic phenomena, and even suggest policies that might be helpful. But simple models based on simple assumptions --- like all the models of microeconomic theory --- are far from the real world, and do not support sweeping policy conclusions. We make no claims about the implications of the theories for policies, sweeping or otherwise.

In the last 50 years, academic publishing has been invaded by for-profit businesses. Academics donate their research and their refereeing services to these companies, who then lock up the research and sell it back to the academy at prices that are usually high and sometimes stratospheric. Since 2003 I have opted out of that racket; with one small exception, I have submitted work only to nonprofit publishers and have refereed papers and books only for nonprofit organizations. (In the single exception --- which was a mistake --- I insisted that I would be able to make the final version of my paper freely available.) In the mid-2000s I was a member of a group of economic theorists that founded an Open Access journal, Theoretical Economics, and I served as the editor of that journal for several years. I remain devoted to the principle that academic research should be freely available, and am delighted that Open Book Publishers is publishing Models in Microeconomic Theory.

'Models in Microeconomic Theory ('She' Edition)' is an Open Access title available to read and download for free here. You can also read and download the 'He' Edition at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/1159.

INC

Out now: Tod#35 The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows

INC is proud to share with you the publication of The Arab Archive, Edited by Donatella Della Ratta, Kay Dickinson, and Sune Haugbolle.

As the revolutions across the Arab world that came to a head in 2011 devolved into civil war and military coup, representation and history acquired a renewed and contested urgency. The capacities of the internet have enabled sharing and archiving in an unprecedented fashion. Yet, at the same time, these facilities institute a globally dispersed reinforcement and recalibration of power, turning memory and knowledge into commodified and copyrighted goods. In The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows, activists, artists, filmmakers, producers, and scholars examine which images of struggle have been created, bought, sold, repurposed, denounced, and expunged. As a whole, these cultural productions constitute an archive whose formats are as diverse as digital repositories looked after by activists, found footage art documentaries, Facebook archive pages, art exhibits, doctoral research projects, and ‘controversial’ or ‘violent’ protest videos that are abruptly removed from YouTube at the click of a mouse by sub-contracted employees thousands of kilometers from where they were uploaded. The Arab Archive investigates the local, regional, and international forces that determine what materials, and therefore which pasts, we can access and remember, and, conversely, which pasts get erased and forgotten.

Download or order your copy here:

https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/tod35-the-arab-archive-mediated-memories-and-digital-flows/

Open Book Publishers

Gallucci’s Commentary on Dürer’s ‘Four Books on Human Proportion’: Renaissance Proportion Theory

by James Hutson

Ever since the seminal publication on human proportion by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer, the relevance to such studies to other areas was rarely in question. Writers on poetry, natural philosophy, astronomy and astrology, and the visual arts all found a useful interpretative schema readymade in the human form and used it to explain complex ideas to a diverse audience. Yet the 1591 translation and commentary by a Venetian pedagogue, Giovan Paolo Gallucci would prove one of the most lasting for the education of the youth of his republic, artists, collectors, and art theorists for centuries. His his Della simmetria dei corpi humaniwould be published in 1591 and was an Italian translation Dürer’s work. While Dürer’s proportion studies were translated into French (1557) and Latin (1532), the Italian version (reprinted in 1594) greatly expanded the artistic discourse and availability of information on human anatomy in Italy and remained the version most often cited in later baroque treatises.

In order to expand the educational potential of his treatise, Gallucci added his own Preface, Life of Dürer, and Fifth Book, wherein he elaborated on the interdisciplinary knowledge painters must possess in order to effectively produce history paintings that illustrate the “affectations of the soul” (affetti del animo). This required drawing upon the sister art of poetry, as well as physiognomics, the discipline concerned with the judgment of human character from individual features, as well as pathognomics, a theory of how the expressive movements of figures reveal the passions. In his Fifth Book, following over two-hundred sets of proportions recorded by Dürer of various body types, Gallucci elaborates on these various passions in fifty-seven chapters. As a reference guide for painters who wished to show, for instance, an insolent or humble man, he provides not only a description of the desired figure, but bolsters his assertions with appropriate passages from epic poetry, especially Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532) and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), and ancient philosophers, above all Aristotle.

This translation and commentary includes an introduction that contextualizes the treatise and sets it within the dialectic of arts education in an era of institutionalization. The volume would complement (and even become more popular than) the encyclopedic Trattato (1584) of Lomazzo and his philosophical apologia the Idea del Tempio (1590). Like Lomazzo, Gallucci knew that the usefulness of the text as a reference guide for artists needed to be supplemented with a broader understanding of the natural sciences. The attempts made to categorize and map the human body were understood by art-theorists, astrologers and cosmologists as an attempt to reveal the macrocosm of the universe, and thus reveal its “divinely” ordered beauty in the microcosm of man. Such information concerning the structure of the universe was seen as necessary for artists to understand in order to reveal the beauty buried in imperfect material existence. In newly formed educational institutions, such as the Accademia del Disegno and Accademia di San Luca, later in the century, treatises such as Gallucci’s were considered necessary for the training of young artists. Moreover, the ideological underpinnings of his argument would be influential for the axioms of Nicholas Poussin, who, in turn, formed the formal and theoretical basis for the French Academy and academic art until the nineteenth century.

It has been my intent with this commentary and translation to make available for the first time in English the complete and original chapter of Gallucci, which seeks to show how Dürer’s proportion studies could and should be used by artists. In describing all manner of men and women, and the various emotional states they may find themselves in, we have not only an easy-to-reference manual for working artists, but an invaluable insight into the intellectual milieu of the day and how they viewed the world. Expectations of different genders, classes, and more are all laid bare for the modern reader. Thus, I believe the work is a valued addition to any undergraduate art history course on early modern art, but also of great interest to those in the history of science, as well as early modern history and literature.

‘Gallucci's Commentary on Dürer’s Four Books on Human Proportion’ Renaissance Proportion Theory is an Open Access title. Click here to read and download this title for free.

Janneke Adema

Coronavirus: an idea to identify articles that aren’t OA yet, but could be

As posted to the Global Open Access List, scholcomm and the radical open access list, following is a suggestion for how to identify articles on coronavirus that are not yet open access. The majority of these articles will be in journals that allow author self-archiving, and some may be published by authors covered by open access policies. Communication with authors and/or journals may be helpful to improve the percentage of open access.

A PubMed search for “coronavirus” limited to the past 10 years then limited again to free full-text yields results of 55% free full-text. With no date limit, it’s 46%.

This search will get at research on COVID and the next most relevant research, all the other coronaviruses (mers, sars, common cold), and will be helpful for researchers and medical practitioners anywhere.

China’s early release of the COVID genetic code and even traditional publishers scrambling to make COVID resources free is demonstrating that people get at least some of the points of open access and open research.

It would be interesting to compare publisher responses today with earlier epidemics. If I recall correctly, there is a significant change from responding to pressure to proactively making resources free without OA pressure.

This is progress. It’s not 100% OA but a lot more researchers and practitioners have free access to a lot more of our knowledge than was the case with the 2003 Sars epidemic.

Further pressure might be helpful. Identification and analysis of the 45% PubMed results that are coronavirus but not free full-text would identify suitable targets for gentle pressure. Some such articles may have been written by authors covered by an OA policy. Such a results list would likely yield journal lists and individual articles, many of which could be deposited in repositories thanks to the efforts of green OA advocates.

Librarians and others working from home can send e-mails to authors and it should be possible to add items to repositories remotely. Publishers who are green not gold should ideally work with PMC and can also send e-mails to authors reminding them of the green policy.

Although research on coronavirus is urgent, university researchers who are also teachers are likely swamped due to a sudden shift to online teaching this semester. For this group, it might make sense to time communication after the semester ends.

Just some ideas…

Cite as: Morrison, H. (2020). Coronavirus: an idea to identify articles that aren’t OA yet, but could be. Sustaining the Knowledge Commons. https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2020/03/31/coronavirus-an-idea-to-identify-articles-that-arent-oa-yet-but-could-be/

Janneke Adema

COVID-19 open access and open research: good progress and what is missing

Major publishers are making research and data directly related to COVID-19 freely available. This is good news, and may reflect progress towards open access over the past two decades, because the arguments for free sharing of information in the context of pandemic are so compelling, as I touched on in this post.

A few examples, current best practices and gaps, will follow, but first, a few notes to explain why we need to move beyond open sharing of directly related resources to include all resources.

Scientists working on COVID: while the greatest need is research and data directly on COVID per se, some pieces of the puzzle of solving any scientific problem can come from any branch of scientific inquiry. For example, basic research on how the respiratory system works, viruses and their transmission, may provide clues that will help COVID scientists. Some of this knowledge may be locked up in the print collections of libraries that are closed to limit spread of the virus.
Practitioners dealing with the more severe cases are often dealing with patients who have other health issues. Clinical research on the other issues and relevant co-morbidity studies (e.g. when people with the other illness have other types of pneumonia) might save some lives.
Educational institutions and governments that want to speed up training of health professionals to cope with the pandemic need the full range of knowledge relating to the health professions, in addition to COVID-specific resources. This includes all of the basic sciences (biology, chemistry, physics), much of the social sciences, as well as arts and humanities for a well-rounded education (e.g. foster creativity through arts, cultural understanding for clinical care through humanities).
The pandemic per se raises a great many major secondary challenges, particularly the social challenges of helping entire populations cope with lock-down and the short and medium-term economic challenges. To address these challenges, we need all of our knowledge about communications, information, psychology, culture and history, along with classical and political economics. Part of the immediate solution to help people cope with lockdown is culture and arts. Like the COVID resources, many arts organizations and individual artists are making their works freely available. This is welcome and useful, but raises questions about economic support for artists and the arts so that this can continue; these are economic questions as well as challenges for the arts. We need open access to all of our knowledge to move forward with these secondary challenges. Right now is an excellent time to do this, because some of these secondary challenges are critical to dealing with the pandemic and limiting short and medium-term damage, and because so many researchers everywhere are working from home and would be able to benefit from this access.
Libraries are an essential service and have been providing online services for many resources. In the short term, one way to contribute even further: It should be possible to have people work at scanning stations to digitize material not yet online while maintaining social distancing.

Examples of major publisher COVID-19 related initiatives for comparative purposes follow. Note that I use parent company names first as part of an ongoing effort to help people understand the nature of these organizations, whether publicly traded corporations or privately held businesses, often with multiple divisions of which scholarly publishing forms just one part.

RELX (Elsevier +): COVID responses across all company divisions, featured prominently on home page; Novel Coronavirus Center “;with the latest medical and scientific information on COVID-19. The center has been set up since the start of the outbreak and is in English and Mandarin. Elsevier has provided full access to this content for PubMed Central”; COVID-19 clinical toolkit; free institutional access to ClinicalKey student platform until the end of June; rapid publication (preprints and data) of COVID-19 related works; data visualization of the impact of the virus on the aviation industry; LexisNexis free, comprehensive COVID-19 related legal news coverage; turned exhibition space in Austria into a functional hospital.

SpringerNature: “As a leading research publisher, Springer Nature is committed to supporting the global response to emerging outbreaks by enabling fast and direct access to the latest available research, evidence, and data.”

informa (Taylor & Francis +): no mention of COVID on parent company home page; Taylor & Francis COVID-19 resource center: microsite that provides “links and references to all relevant COVID-19 research articles, book chapters and information that can be freely accessed on Taylor & Francis Online and Taylor & Francis ebooks in support of the global efforts in diagnosis, treatment, prevention and further research into COVID-19″; prioritizing rapid publication of COVID-19 research.

Wiley offers free access to resources until the end of the Spring 2020 term to help with online education; ” making all current and future research content and data on the COVID-19 Resource Site available to PubMed Central”.

Discussion

Some best practices beyond making directly relevant resources free from different companies that others could follow:

Comprehensive, company-wide COVID-19 response: RELX (Elsevier +)
Help for educational institutions facing the challenge of suddenly moving online: Wiley
Rapid publication: informa (Taylor & Francis +), RELX (Elsevier +)
PubMedCentral deposit, facilitating search by researchers and best long-term solution: Wiley, RELX (Elsevier +)

Gaps

No hospital for countries most in need (another hospital in Austria is welcome, but there are many other countries with greater needs).
Resources beyond those most directly and obviously related to COVID-19.
Language: the only language mentioned besides English is RELX / Elsever, and only Mandarin is mentioned.

INC

Letizia Chiappini: While I feel unsafe and stay in the Netherlands

It’s early morning and the Italian news is dramatic. The Corona virus is hitting Northern Italy with a magnitude comparable to China. My mother and my grandma are there alone. Confined at home, scared and victims of a wretched television that shows sensationalists news about Corona-virus. Numbers are growing. Young individuals are safe, they said, older are in danger. I am puzzled, between heartbroken for my beloved ones in Italy and incredulous because in the Netherlands one month ago everything was still ‘gezellig’ (cozy).

Each morning I start with my routine, opening social media platforms on my phone, jumping in a compulsive way between Instagram stories and Facebook, mmmh so booooring. Let’s open Twitter. Twitter is exploding, like a square during a riot. I need to take part of this riot, I think.

Letizia_Chiappini @Molly_Ulysses. 22 March 2020.

“I feel unsafe. The #netherlands are playing with lives and their public care system. They are the most stubborn country ever. No empathy for countries like #Italy or #Spain, nor for expats. Colonialist mindset comes into play also during #covid19Nederland times #LockdownHolland.”

Then a journalist approached me.

Klaas Broekhuizen @KlaasBroekhuize 23 March 2020. Answer to @Molly_Ulysses

“Care to talk about this? Klaas Broekhuizen, reporter Dutch Financial Daily.”

So, yes, sure. I would love to expand my 280 characters in a broader reflection.

Klaas Broekhuizen asked me few questions by email. Here the rest of the story…

My main question: what would make you feel safe/more safe? What’s missing? What should we learn from other countries, and specifically from Spain and Italy?

Here my answer:

I will start with a quote by Pierpaolo Pasolini (The Tears of Excavator, from The Ashes of Gramsci, 1957).

“Only to love, only to know,
are what matter; not having loved, having known. It’s agony

to live a consummated love.
The soul, straitjacketed, just can’t grow.”

My sentiment towards the Netherlands, where I’ve lived for three years, is one of love. As part of the Millenial-Erasmus generation, I have been in love with Europe and the benefit of traveling as a student during my undergrad. I’ve had a sort of poly-amorous relationship with European countries. I have been traveling and living for a long time in other European countries with the myth of a strong European Union. For me ‘we are family’. When I truly love, I truly want to understand. That’s my motto as a researcher. The sentiments behind my Tweet are love and dismay.

As an intellectual and theorist, I have been observing the decline of the ‘glorious thirty years’, the roll back of the state in providing welfare measures, in favor of more individualistic and neoliberal regimes of policy in Europe. The Netherlands, after praising itself for its extreme social liberalism, is trapped by right-wing populism which has been increased after austerity and the consequent blaming of migrants, Islam and expats for the crisis. As Dr. Merijn Oudenampsen (Universiteit van Amsterdam), wrote about “the remarkably radical transformation in the 1980s and 1990s of the Netherlands into one of the most liberalized European economies, and the paradoxical manifestation of Dutch neo-liberalism in a depoliticized, consensual guise.” As the Netherlands has become one the most most laissez-faire and neo-liberal countries in Europe, I am not surprised that Rutte is a voyeur of the Anglo-American project, in particular during the Covid19 crisis, in which the death rattle of neol-iberal countries is DON’T CRASH THE ECONOMY! Mentioning ‘groepsimmuniteit’ in a public speech in front of mourning other countries such as Italy, where there are tanks carrying corpses because mortuaries are full, felt like the denial of other people’s disasters, of other countries which shows a lack of empathy. Policies often reflect the ‘lokale politiek’ and the cultural ideology of a country. To respond to your question: And is it the policy, or is it the Dutch people (as well)?

‘’Playing with lives’’ is making presumptions, Rutte and other politicians don’t listen, don’t learn. What about vulnerable people? What about homeless? What about expats? A fact is that all my internationals students ran away from the Netherlands after they heard about the crisis in their countries. The Netherlands without expats that highjacked their economy is difficult to imagine. It’s like Amsterdam without Italian, Spanish and Brits tourists is empty.

‘’The colonialist mindset’’ is there, it presumes that you are right and righteous. Altruism and solidarity were not sentiments during the colonial historical momentum. Colonialism is not a heritage, it is a shame. An indigenous woman told me about surviving during the violence of colonialism which conducted her both to complain and NOT to complain. Both actions were a sort of protection for her and for her people. I have found myself in this condition. We must learn a lot from indigenous people. Not from the patriarchal countries and glorious colonialists patronising other populations. I express myself by sharing in our digital square, like Twitter. I don’t complain, I survive. As Audre Lorde (2017) claims in her book “Your Silence Will Not Protect You’’. That’s why I spoke up. I am not a conflict avoider, I am not passive aggressive. I am passionate and I love. You can build a wall from silence, but it is difficult to find love from silence and indifference.

From the tweet (and LinkedIn) I get you live in The Netherlands? At least part of the time? If so, how long have you lived here?

Before the corona-crisis, I felt part of this country and I am still part of it. I will stay in the Netherlands to grasp what it is going on in our dysfunctional society. The problem is global, there is no escape. I change tactics. Sara Ahmed, wrote in one her recent contribution: “In order to survive institutions, we need to change them. It can be a difficult deal: how we survive some structures can be how those structures are reproduced.” This crisis shows the cracks of EU as institutions. But it is not a failure, if we all try to change it! The way in which the Netherlands is acting shows a failure of being part of Europe. Why does Rutte did not act earlier when the crisis start in Northern Italy? Spain and Italy are part of EU, so why dismiss them? As an excuse — politicians claim, old people will die, that’s the echo. But old people are my grandma, your parents, your friends. Would it be fine for you to let them die?

Do you plan to leave The Netherlands asap? Maybe even stop your research at the UvA (temporarily)? And stop teaching in Utrecht (temporarily)?

Those questions… the average Dutch person always asks to expat those precise questions. I have found them offensive, a sort of micro-aggression and those kind of questions always upset me. Other Dutch minds consider me part of this country. Now, I ask you. Why should I leave the country and close the door? To build a wall of silence? No, I am sorry I will stay and try to contribute with my complaints to a better society. I love my students, I love my colleagues, I love my work. I love my research. I love the ideal of Europe as an institution that protect its citizens.

For populists, right-wing and sovereignist parties the idea that leave your country is absurd and a ‘Wilders-Baudet’ like suggestions. Those are my suggestions for them, but perhaps it works also for the premier Mark Rutte to remind him how important is to stay united and keep expats in his magnanimous country. If we all leave as expat, the economy will smash so badly.