On 11 June, we celebrated the completion of the digitisation of the Collectio academica antiqua (Caa), a core collection of works published by members of the Old University of Leuven (OUL, 1425-1797). It started 10years ago as a common effort of colleagues at both KU Leuven Libraries and UCLouvain.

I decided years ago to only submit to publication venues which offer OA options without author costs (DOA or liberal selfarchiving policies) and only do peer review for non-profit and community-led publication venues.

Humanities and social science profs are finding out how natural scientists treat authorship and we are losing our damn minds.

Outstanding debt settled: 100 km of Ypres finished (which turned out to be 104,4 km of course), when 80 km was all I could muster last year.

It’s our birthday! Special Collections is celebrating its tenth anniversary on 1 May. Would you like to know what we’ve achieved over the past ten years? Then head over to bib.kuleuven.be/english/spec....

There's a dangerous conflation in this discussion of cyberattacks and shadow libraries like Sci-Hub and Z Library. I'm not denying that shadow libraries do harvest content from institutional collections but the real cyberattack threats are ransomware groups like Rhysida. #UKSG2026

→ The Partnership for Open Access #POA Welcomes KU Leuven and UiT The Arctic University of Norway for 2026 👏 We asked @viroviacum.bsky.social and @aspaasper.bsky.social what their contributions says about their institution's commitments to #OpenAccess and #OpenScience. 🔗 shorturl.at/NAgpQ

'I would set off, with some sense of what I might be looking for, and see what I stumbled across...' Is going for a walk a valid methodology for a historian? And if so, how much theory do you need to read before you start? Some thoughts in my latest blog post: manyheadedmonster.com/2026/02/10/i...

Starting to get a tad concerned about the number of UK universities that are apparently completely oblivious to the post-2029 REF open access mandate for chapters and monographs. Like, if you'd rather NOT to pay R&P deals for those too, maybe now is the time to start funding diamond open access?

Interested to work on our collections? The Call for applications of the LECTIO – KU Leuven Visiting Fellowships 2026–2027 is now open. As in previous years, Special Collections offers a joint fellowship. We will be happy to welcome you!

Wow, it's truly going to be a global conference! 🌐 In person ticket sales end on 8 Feb, online deadline is 18 Feb 📆 Get your ticket NOW - when they're gone, they're GONE ⌛

New measure of academic impact just dropped: number of citations received to papers that chatgpt created and fraudulently attributed to you.

I am a 3%’er (and was lucky enough to tell the tale), but we’re sadly not talking about wealth in this case vrtnws.be/p.E19naj44E

We’re excited to announce the launch of Philosophical Logic at the Open Library of Humanities. This follows another mass editorial resignation at Springer Nature (open letter linked in the announcement). Read more:

A short commentary to reflect on open research in the humanities

Is this how parents feel when their child becomes a teenager? A glance at a decade of Artes. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Registrationq for Bibliotech Hackaton 2026 now (yes NOW) open! bib.kuleuven.be/english/rese...

"Acquiring the Karger journals will provide OUP with many more downstream transfer destinations, helping OUP to publish more of the articles that get rejected by their higher impact journals." Depressing assessment of the commercial strategy guiding academic publishing.

How Fanfiction Can Help Us Reimagine Scholarly Publishing | Katina Magazine https://katinamagazine.org/content/article/open-knowledge/2025/how-fanfiction-can-help-reimagine-scholarly-publishing

"Journal articles are the lifeblood of living scholarship." ...errr, I beg to differ. The lifeblood of living scholarship is scholars or the scholarly community or...humans.

Delighted to see our new book - The Experience of Work in Early Modern England - out now, and open access (free!) doi-org.bris.idm.oclc.org/10.1017/9781...

Next time an institution tells you how seriously it takes research misconduct, ask them if it's *this* seriously. www.bmj.com/content/297/...

How is anyone going to do the work that leads up to those big grants? You need loads of small bits of financial support for most humanities research (or, well, job security and non-overload with teaching & admin but 🤷‍♀️) and to support the groundwork. Only massive grants skew the research environment.

I'm very excited to be part of the vibrant FUTURES Festival this year, inviting people to get involved with exciting research happening in the South West. Come along to Exeter Phoenix - you will also be able to see posters belonging to the wills project leader @jwhittle.bsky.social Programme 👇

[VIDEO] Open Book Collective in action! Hear from @openbookcollective.bsky.social members and partners about why we need a fairer and more sustainable future for scholarly books ⚖️ 📽️

Big news for #DiamondOA! The #EDCH receives a 3-year grant from the Gates Foundation to boost services & build a #community of OA publishers in Europe. 👉 Read more: buff.ly/pxcyTxd

Demmy name-checked @openlibhums.org and @openbookcollective.bsky.social as reasons to be hopeful in scholarly publishing. He finished by arguing that the future belongs to those who can discover new ways of publishing research outside of commercial models (I paraphrase). #OASPA25

ACCOUNTABILITY of where support is happening for open infrastructure with Transparency to Sustain Open Science Infrastructure tsosi.org explained in this Katina story katinamagazine.org/content/arti...

Yeah well whose fault is that??

Reconstructed that I must have written and submitted this chapter in …. 2009, and never heard anything about it any more until receiving a copy in 2025. Luckily, my chapter does not present the cure for cancer. (4) (end of rant)

Then tried to reconstruct when I would have written/submitted this. Traced an email from 2016 when I asked editor about an update about the book / my contribution (to which I never received an answer, and then forgot about it altogether). (3)

Publisher invokes a “contributor protocol” that I cannot imagine ever having agreed to, so I asked for written proof that I did. (2)

Just received a copy of a book chapter I can’t remember writing (topic makes sense from a previous life, but no recollection having written this piece). Can’t remember ever getting feedback and have certainly not seen proofs (I would have corrected an obvious mistake). (1)

The main thing I'm taking from this talk in #OpenFest25 with @simonxix.com @kjsanders.bsky.social @samuelmoore.org and Hannah Hillan is that if we want an open access movement that is equitable and diverse, the process of publishing matters at least as much as whether or not outputs are open

The new book "Publishing Beyond the Market" by Samuel A. Moore @samoore.bsky.social reimagines a more ethical, noncommercial approach to open access publishing. Start reading the #OpenAccess book at doi.org/10.3998/mpub...

highly recommend! nuanced analysis of what we are trying to achieved what can go wrong on the way there. oa not the end (and certainly not at all cost).

weekend plans? sorted

Libraries are not given budget to buy content but to support scholarly communications. Buying content is a means to an end, not the end.

Can't repost this enough. A very misleading headline to a very clear message in the content of the article: OA is not the problem, big publishers and APCs & TAs are the problem.

Never thought about it this way, but this sounds very right to my ears and one of those light bulbs moments explaining the lack of progress I’ve been struggling with for a long time now.

NEW ARTICLE: 'How Should Diamond Open Access Work for Books?' Published today in Katina Magazine, and written by @alittleroad.bsky.social, @ivamz.bsky.social, Vanessa Proudman, Ursula Rabar, and @nielsstern.bsky.social -- find out more here: openaccessbooksnetwork.hcommons.org/2025/07/09/h...

New article in Katina Magazine: 'How Should Diamond Open Access Work for Books?' Intended as an intervention into the ongoing discussions & activity around #DiamondOA to bring books into focus, the authors want to foster further conversations on this topic & invite feedback. Comment yours below 👇

On days like this, I think that “Il faut cultiver son jardin” in my case means helping to publish a DOA humanities journal, and I’m ok with that.

rather sad this concludes my rereading of the campus trilogy of Lodge. already looking forward to rereading it again in another 20 years or so. should be a nice cycle - first time: grad student, second time: tenured faculty, third time: pensioner

I don’t regret having studied what I studied, and enjoy doing the work that I am doing, but sometimes, and especially when I hear things like this, I want to take a year of and try to understand more of tech and communication (and, while i’m at it, publishing).

Funerals should just be car boot sales of all your stuff with a jacket potato and real ale stall, and everyone can wander round your stuff reminiscing about how weird you were, and wondering why you’ve so many sea-salt dispensers. The family can keep the money or donate it to charity.

What is a University Press? On the acquisition of AUP by T&F (and my anger at it), the governance link between universities and university presses, and putting one's labour where one's values are. eve.gd/2025/06/08/w...

We have a new @opensciencenl.bsky.social call! We invite interested researchers and support staff to submit applications for the CfP: ‘Research on open science’. Focus is on research into #openscience practices, with the aim of strengthening the evidence base. www.openscience.nl/en/news/rese...

I hate to admit it, but my accent in Dutch is not much better than my accent in English www.youtube.com/watch?v=50p_...