In which the pond proposes retirement for sundry reptiles, notes the new brand of climate science denialism, and moves on to a distraction ...

 

The pond realises it has been pushing the summer school of herpetology for striving students a tad hard, and decided that the time was right for a break.

The inspiration came from Dame Slap's rousing call this morning ...

What to say, except perhaps to add that it's time for a new generation of reptile journalists to step up. 

Dame Slap has done her very best to fuck the country and the planet, and bet the house on the likes of "Lord" Monckton and Ian Plimer, and now it's time to hand over to a new generation of emerging climate science denying scribblers. 

It's not just her, the whole tribe of ancient reptile elders should pack up and go ... Dame Groan, the bromancer, nauseating "Ned", prattling Polonius, Killer Creighton, the dog botherer, they're all getting long in the tooth, and they should be standing aside and promoting their successors.

And that's about all the pond has to offer on the matter of Dame Slap, except perhaps an offer of unmitigated contempt... but as she's in the business of offering career advice to others, why not offer a little to her? Oh along with a goodly dose of profound contempt ...

And that way the pond wouldn't have to deal with this tired summer silly reptile season line-up ...

That Melissa Coburn in the far right slot isn't a dinkum reptile replacement offering. 

Only a week ago, she could be found scribbling in L'Age ... inter alia ...

...In a city of busy, scurrying workers preoccupied with the deadlines that must be met before the Christmas break, here was a pocket of beauty, like a waterfall stumbled upon by chance on a hot ramble through the bush. The hymns – such as Once in Royal David’s City and O Holy Night – swept around the foyer, spinning images of something precious that is sometimes lost in the pragmatic demands of the working day.
The words of O Holy Night, sung in thunderous, electrifying harmonies – “Fall on your knees! O hear the angel voices! O night divine, O night when Christ was born …” – resounded like a command or a rebuke, sending chills down my spine.
The words were truthful; we would fall on our knees, speechless, in the face of the reality of the extraordinary nature of God, both the creator of life and yet seemingly incongruously personal in His gentleness towards, and love of, the individual. The hymns resurrected another reality, characterised by a simplicity and grace.
They took the breath away and filled the eyes with trembling tears that could not be shed, not there, in the bustling business heart of Melbourne. Instead, I studied the shiny, patterned floor of that enchanting old building, mesmerised by the echo of something eternal that had found a voice and rung out across the city.

Dear sweet long absent lord, and for the reptiles she was scribbling about vulgar youff having a New Year's Eve party, shouting and rapping in a strange lingo while getting pissed as parrots while she was off to bed early ...

If the pond wanted nauseating nostalgia for old folk, it would just offer up a cartoon ...

Meanwhile, the top digital slot and the tree killer edition were being held by the usual reptile hysteria about renewables, solar and sun worship ...

 

It's astonishing how alarmist and hysterical the rag routinely is these days, just another tabloid in the fading tabloid of the Chairman Emeritus's dreaming.

Whenever the pond reads the reptiles ranting on about catastrophists and climate science as religion, the pond realises it's merely reptile projection.

The thrust, the point of the alarmist story, was the enabling of yet another lizard Oz editorial ...

Broken power system still fuelled by calls for subsidy

By Editorial

12:00AM January 3, 2024

A plea by energy retailers for higher prices to compensate for the rising use of household rooftop solar is an inevitable and predictable confirmation of the dysfunction that now characterises Australia’s electricity system. It represents another chapter in a tale of cascading subsidies that have become necessary as a system rooted in baseload generation from coal is forcibly switched over to one dependent on variable sources of renewable energy such as wind and solar.

If retailers get their way, energy users who have been forced to subsidise renewable energy projects, including rooftop solar, will be asked to pay more for the projects that these renewables were designed to force out of the market in the first place. The new cost would be included as part of the regulated price that retailers are allowed to charge. The power retailers also are largely the owners of the coal-fired power stations that still supply most of the nation’s electricity but are being rendered unprofitable by design and forced to close.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has upped the ante on the subsidy regime with a turbocharged Capacity Investment Scheme that will underwrite the profitability of 32 gigawatts of new renewable projects, up from 6GW previously. Like rooftop solar, the overbuild of large-scale renewables is needed to meet Labor’s target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030. This target also is being revised upwards.

A large amount of wind and solar is required to deal with the fact individual projects will produce for only some of the time. But when they are all working together it is likely there will be a glut, as is the case with rooftop solar on sunny days when there is low demand. Wholesale prices are now often negative in the middle of the day.

But regardless of how many wind and solar projects are built, it’s likely there still will be periods of shortage that must be plugged when intermittent power generation is not sufficient. The experience in Britain has been that baseload generators have demanded subsidies to be available still when needed under a capacity market. Renewable generators that are producing power that is not needed have demanded to be paid as well.

Projects designed to help, such as the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro and expanded transmission network, are proving to be slower and more expensive than promised. Under Mr Bowen’s latest scheme, taxpayers will be on the hook to ensure all of the projects approved as part of the 32GW target achieve a minimum rate of return. Ironically, the subsidies will make renewable energy, the so-called cheapest option, more expensive than it otherwise would be. But a price guarantee and overbuild ensure that other options such as nuclear will struggle to find space in the market to justify their cost.

If adopted, the latest call for assistance from electricity retailers will be felt directly by energy users. Retailers want a higher price because of fierce competition from rooftop solar as well as the looming impact of batteries and offshore wind that will depress prices in the evening, after the sun has stopped shining and when wholesale prices traditionally have spiked. Retailers are urging the Australian Energy Regulator to factor the rise of solar into its considerations when determining the default market offer from July.

After two years of big increases in the default market offer price, the political pressure will be for the AER not to approve another big increase. But the laws of physics dictate that power will have to come from somewhere and private sector economics suggests absorbing sustained losses is not an option for generators.

This leaves taxpayers and users on the hook to continue Band-Aiding a system that has been broken by ideology and a lack of proper planning.

"Broken by ideology"? As any dedicated herpetology student knows, that's reptile code for a refusal to bend the knee to climate science denialism, and a refusal to embrace the reptiles' eternal, undying love for dinkum sweet innocent virginal Oz coal ...

Luckily Wilcox had offered up a relevant cartoon as a way of starting the year ...

Yay, alarmist reptiles, where's the next generation coming from? 

Given the dearth of reptiles, luckily the pond had a piece on standby.

As any passing observer would know, the house of mouse has finally had to let go the earliest iteration of the mouse, after years of making US legislators do their best to keep the mouse in copyright (what a falling out that was between Ron DeSanctimonious and the house of mouse, what a ruination of the originalist concept of copyright, with SCOTUS always willing to take alms from the rich).

John Oliver had fun with the mouse late last year ...

The pond is now looking forward to a slasher pic starring the mouse, the fate that befell Pooh not so long ago in Blood and Honey...

Talk of copyright also turned up in the NYRB as The Dream of a Universal Library ... (possible paywall, the pond can never tell).

It was by Robert Darnton and it offered the lede Digitization promised to democratize learning, and despite countervailing forces the trend is toward more open access. But is an ‘Alexandria in the cloud’ really an open sesame? 

Ostensibly it was a review of a book ...

Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All

by Peter Baldwin

MIT Press, 405 pp., $35.00

Of course the question of paywalls wasn't seriously discussed, but there were questions about the price of academic knowledge ...

In 1991 the World Wide Web seemed to provide a path to a dazzling future: everyone in the world would be able to communicate, at a minimal cost, with everyone else through the Internet. In 2004 Google promised to make that future even brighter. By digitizing library holdings, Google would create a modern Library of Alexandria: everyone would have free access to all the books in existence. Digitization promised to open up the world of learning to the excluded and the underprivileged, particularly in developing countries. But it touched off an equal and opposite reaction in the form of closed access, paywalls, and monopolies. The world of learning has become a battleground between the opposed forces of democratization and commercialization.

To be sure, the complex realities of technology, publishing, libraries, and authorship cannot be reduced to a Manichaean notion of progressives battling money-grubbers, because most of the participants in the knowledge industries pursue self-interest, whether it is profit or prestige. The recent history of academic books and journals shows how these interests have collided, driven by tectonic shifts in the global order of research and publication.

As soon as it began to digitize libraries, Google became entangled in copyright law, which protects rights to a book for the life of the author plus seventy years—that is, in most cases, for more than a century. A moving wall now keeps all books published since 1927 out of the public domain, but Google has forged ahead, digitizing everything (though without making entire texts available), despite having been sued by rights holders for infringement of copyright.

By agreeing on a settlement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, Google converted what was originally a free search service involving only snippets from books into a profit-driven commercial library. In order to subscribe to Google Book Search, research libraries, which had made their holdings available to Google free of charge, would be required to buy back digital versions of their own books at a price set by Google, one that could escalate beyond their ability to pay. In 2011 the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York declared that the settlement violated antitrust law. Its decision prevented the creation of a new kind of monopoly, one that would control access to knowledge in digital form.

The death of Google Book Search nevertheless meant that most books published during the last one hundred years cannot be made freely available to the public except as volumes loaned by libraries one copy at a time. The nonprofit Internet Archive has bravely made digital versions accessible, also with restrictions to single copies (the digitized counterparts to the physical volumes in its collection), but in March it lost a suit to publishers who accused it of violating their copyrights. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (known as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act because the copyright on Mickey was about to expire) cemented the extent of copyright at the author’s life plus seventy years. According to Jack Valenti, a champion of Hollywood interests, copyright should exist for eternity minus one day.

Yet Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution requires that copyright should extend “for limited Times” only, subject to the purpose of promoting “the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” In the first US Copyright Act, in 1790, Congress decreed that “for the encouragement of learning,” the term should last fourteen years, renewable once. That act was modeled on the first copyright law, England’s Statute of Anne (1710), which, also “for the encouragement of learning,” limited copyright to a maximum of twenty-eight years. Today most books cease to sell in large numbers within a year or two. Protection for twenty-eight years would be adequate for all but a handful of authors, and it would leave room for a greater good—the public’s access to knowledge. In deviating from its original purpose, copyright legislation has gone only downhill since the time of the Founding Fathers.

Monopolistic abuses are far worse in the publishing of academic journals. Three publishers—Reed Elsevier (now RELX), Wiley, and Springer—dominate the field, producing 42 percent of scientific journals in the English language. They sell most copies to research libraries, ratcheting up the prices so mercilessly that they cripple acquisitions budgets. The average annual subscription price of a chemistry journal is now $7,014. The current price of a full subscription to The Journal of Comparative Neurology is $40,000—the average cost of five hundred to six hundred academic monographs.

Once a university library has subscribed to a journal, it is hooked, because it cannot cancel the subscription without alienating scientists on the faculty who demand an uninterrupted flow of up-to-date information. Faculty members do the research, contribute the articles, referee submissions by others, and serve on editorial boards, almost all for free, and then expect their library to pay for the journals they have helped produce, no matter how extortionate the price. Publishers claim to add editorial value to the articles, but the published version is often nearly the same as the submitted version, so they usually add little—and to buy them libraries have to subtract sums from their budgets for monographs in fields outside the sciences.

The irrationality of the system has been obvious for decades, yet despite many efforts libraries have failed to break the stranglehold of the publishers. The system seemed to reach a breaking point in 2019, when the University of California implemented a two-year boycott of Elsevier journals on all of its ten campuses. In March 2021, after intense negotiations, UC and Elsevier reached an agreement on a four-year contract. Nearly all of Elsevier’s 2,600 journals were made available for reading by UC faculty and students, and the journals were to receive publishing charges (subsidized up to $1,000 by UC libraries) for articles by UC researchers. Such charges, levied on the author, are common in scientific journals, and they often come to $5,000 or more, which is usually covered for the most part by the original research grant.

The agreement made the articles available as “gold” open access (OA)—that is, anyone could consult them without charge—a gain for the general public; but articles by non-UC authors remained behind a paywall, making the journals hybrid (part OA, part paid for by subscriptions). Far from promoting accessibility, hybrid journals maintain publishers’ subscriptions while providing them with additional income from authors. In the end the UC libraries had to pay as much as they did before the deal, about $13 million a year.

Although the millions of dollars in library budgets have not attracted much attention outside the world of libraries, the stakes are high and the issue is political. Most scientific research is subsidized by the federal government. Shouldn’t the public have access to the results of work supported by public funds? The government committed itself to that principle in February 2013 (and in 2008 for funding by the National Institutes of Health) when it directed federal agencies that issued grants worth more than $100 million to require recipients to make their research freely available from digital repositories. But it permitted an embargo of twelve months, which allowed commercial journals to cream off the demand.

Under President Biden, the White House Office of Science and Technology corrected this deficiency in a new directive issued on August 25, 2022. As of December 31, 2025, all agencies, whatever the extent of their funding, must require immediate open access, and the requirement covers data and metadata as well as the final text. The G7 leaders took a similar stand on May 14, 2023, as did the European Council on May 23. The tide is turning in favor of unrestricted access, but the countervailing forces are so complex that the future remains cloudy.To make sense of these issues and the vast literature surrounding them, the best place to begin is Athena Unbound by Peter Baldwin, an eminent historian of modern Europe and the welfare state who has made himself an expert on the history and current practices of scholarly publishing. In 2001 Baldwin and his wife, Lisbet Rausing, created the Arcadia Fund to preserve cultural heritage and promote open access. As a trustee of the New York Public Library and member of the advisory board of the Wikimedia Endowment, he has been a participant observer of recent attempts to free knowledge for the benefit of the general public. And in an excellent earlier book, The Copyright Wars (2016), he demonstrated his command of the legal issues, stretching back to 1710.

In Athena Unbound Baldwin takes a hard look at the world of knowledge. Have no illusions, he warns: journal publishers are gouging their customers, scholarly monographs reach a tiny audience, libraries are floundering under budget pressures, academics are pursuing careers rather than truth, and readers are not getting all the information they deserve. He expresses contempt for “cultural nostalgists,” who have a romantic view of creativity and an outdated attachment to the printed codex.

Yet he also argues that recent trends point to a favorable future. The widespread notion that we are being buried under unmanageable, expensive, and frequently false information is misleading, he claims, because the improvement of search engines will one day help us find everything we need, and the triumph of open access will eventually make all scholarly knowledge available for free.

Baldwin supports his assertions about current trends with plenty of evidence. His book contains sixty-eight pages of notes to an amazing variety of sources, and he relies heavily on quantitative arguments, many of them surprising. For example, on book publishing:

•     The average scholarly monograph these days sells 60 copies….
•     In the major Anglophone outlets, at best around 3,000 books are reviewed annually, out of              500,000 total published in the US and UK….
•     Of the 10,000 US books published in 1930, only 174 were still in print in 2001.

On scientific journals:

•     Elsevier posted robust results for 2020…with profits of over £2 billion on revenues of £7                billion….
•     Two physics articles from the 1990s, presenting findings from work on particle accelerators,          had 406 and 271 coauthors respectively….
•     China issued 21 scholarly journals in 1970, but over 11,000 by 2019.

And on research libraries:

•     In a medium-size US university library, only 20% of books are checked out even once.
•     Major research libraries in North America hold almost a billion physical volumes, but only 59      million distinct titles.

The statistics have a gotcha quality, which jolts the reader into questioning the status quo and considering policies that would change the rules of the game. The greatest change is the cause that Baldwin defends convincingly throughout his book: open access, or practices that would realize the promise of the Internet by making material on it freely available to readers. In fact, OA proposals have generated an enormous literature, which goes back to principles formulated in a manifesto, the Budapest Open Access Initiative of 2002. The declaration recommended two versions of OA: “green” (researchers deposit the final version of an article in a repository, which makes it available to everyone free of charge) and “gold” (journals publish individual articles free of charge to the reader, usually in exchange for hefty publishing fees paid by researchers or their funding sources).

Although the green–gold distinction may seem esoteric, it represents an important fork in the road for university policies. For example, in 2008 the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to take the green route, and their repository now provides readers with a vast amount of research. But journal publishers responded by imposing an embargo, which gave them a temporary monopoly on the material, usually for one year. And because the policy was voluntary, professors often failed to deposit their work. The University of Liège solved that problem by fiat: in deciding on faculty promotions, it refused to consider any articles that were not deposited in its repository. The recent decisions by the White House, which make government grants contingent on immediately accessible deposits, indicate that green is the way forward.

Baldwin, however, seems to favor gold. He concedes that it will not work if not applied globally, but he imagines a future in which journals will give up subscription fees in exchange for payments to publish. A great deal of “flipping” to publishing charges is already occurring. But it often results in hybrid journals, which pocket publishing charges (often paid in part by libraries) for articles they make accessible for free, while continuing to collect subscriptions, also paid for by libraries. Unless all the major scientific journals switch entirely to gold, library budgets will not be able to bear the burden.

In the best of all possible worlds, Baldwin imagines a global bulletin board that would make everything instantly accessible, fusing green and gold. All content, of books as well as articles, would be financed by the producers, stored in the cloud, and downloaded gratis by consumers—or, for readers who favor the printed codex, produced by publishers and sold in the manner of trade books.

The fantasy of a universal library has attracted many dreamers. Baldwin thinks that universal digitization can make the dream come true, because the cloud has infinite storage capacity, even though storage requires servers and financing, and because search engines will inevitably be perfected. Readers need not have doubts about finding what they want in “the new Alexandria in the cloud,” because technology will sort that out. “The perfect search engine will one day provide a universal index,” Baldwin writes. That may sound Panglossian, but Baldwin points to current advances in OA as evidence for optimism.

His argument is most convincing when applied to the publication of scientific articles, where the costs are greatest and the technology most advanced. The Public Library of Science, founded in 2000, publishes a dozen first-rate open access journals. The OA repository arXiv has successfully published more than two million “e-prints” in physics and several other fields, with some preliminary assessment but no peer review. For-profit scientific journals increasingly rely on publishing charges in place of subscriptions, thereby making their content free to readers.

But the prospect for open access looks less promising in the humanities and social sciences. Authors in those fields rarely receive grants that cover publishing charges, and their careers often depend on publishing monographs rather than journal articles. Baldwin makes a strong case that their work, along with that of scientists, should be treated as a public good like clean air and highways. Moreover, he sees vanity and careerism as the driving forces of academic authorship. Academics outside the hard sciences receive salaries, yet feel entitled to royalties on the relatively rare occasions when they publish a book. Baldwin considers such incidental income unjustified because it is earned on company time. The publications of nonscientists should be treated as work for hire, he claims, and should be made virtually free to the public.

That proposition accompanies a general assessment of the scholarly world’s infrastructure, which Baldwin considers antiquated and wasteful. His vision of the future therefore turns into an indictment of the present, and he carries his argument to such extremes that it loses the power to convince.

What, he asks, would be the role of book publishers in a fully digitized environment organized in accordance with open access? After the cost of a book’s first copy is covered, an unlimited supply of subsequent copies, provided directly from an electronic repository, would be virtually free. The publisher’s function as a gatekeeper would cease to exist because there would be no more gates—and therefore an end to “the university world’s thralldom to the prestige hierarchy of the established publishing venues.” Acquisitions editors would be superfluous. Already they do little more than weeding out inferior texts and “reading around on company time,” Baldwin claims. Improved search engines would handle the selection process, taking readers right to the works they want, which would be available on the global bulletin board. Peer review could therefore be eliminated, along with unnecessary apparatuses such as professionally designed layout, indexes, dust jackets, blurbs, and sales catalogs. Most bookstores would disappear; libraries would be reduced to storehouses of old-fashioned volumes; and virtually all cultural intermediaries—book reviewers, literary agents, advertisers—would be eliminated, because their functions would be replaced by the all-powerful search engines putting readers in direct communication with texts in the all-encompassing cloud.

A future in which all books, digitally unified, “become one massive tome,” as Baldwin puts it, sounds like the dystopias of Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Book of Sand” and “The Library of Babel.” In fact, it seems so extreme that Baldwin may dangle it in front of the reader as a provocation, intended merely to expose flaws in the current system. But he fails to consider a main objection to his argument: Is a “global bulletin board” even feasible, and if so, could improved search engines compensate for the elimination of editors, reviewers, librarians, and others who dominate the current process of selection? He does not address the problems of eliminating firewalls in countries like China, nor does he deal with the inadequacies of existing search engines. He barely mentions artificial intelligence, which could flood cyberspace with more misinformation than could ever be overcome by search engines of the future.

Cyberspace may have room for an infinite number of texts, but we must find a way to preserve them. Digitized works are fragile. They are made up of minuscule ones and zeroes that decompose, and they require metadata that is equally vulnerable and that can become obsolete, leaving them lost in the cloud. Present techniques of surveillance and migrating texts from one format to another are expensive and incapable of preserving a universal digital library. Baldwin’s assertion that “everything can be saved” is dubious. My advice to anyone who wants to preserve a digital work is: print it on paper.

Baldwin may have underestimated the staying power of the printed codex. More books are published each year than the year before; publishers are making more money; the number of independent bookstores is increasing; libraries are thriving; and despite the omnipresence of digital devices, readers continue to enjoy holding a volume in their hands and turning pages. The paratextual elements of the printed book—its page design and packaging—continue to be effective, even if only a minority of readers care about its aesthetic aspects, such as the smell and feel of print on paper. Talented professionals continue to produce and disseminate this valuable product, and they provide a public service while making money from it.

Baldwin is correct: the more open access, the better. And he rightly warns us that we live in a real world of vested interests, where the better can be sacrificed to illusions about the best. But he puts too much faith in the self-correcting capacity of “digitality”: “Throw all content against the wall and see what sticks.” I would suggest implementing open access, while covering the wall with shelves and filling them with solid, attractive, and durable books.

Robert Darnton’s latest book is The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748–1789. He is the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian Emeritus at Harvard. (December 2023)

Bet the pond's readers weren't expecting that sort of distraction, a serious discussion of serious issues.

For those who lasted the distance, that warbling Coburn reminded the pond of what it got up to ove the silly season.

While doing some rote mechanical work on the computer, the pond listened to a mob of crusading atheists. 

The pond hadn't done that for what feels like forever. 

It was of course the fault of the logarithms. Once Bertrand Russell turned up and the pond did a fatal click of the mouse (always the bloody mouse), all sorts of ratbags turned up ...

There was the usual - a smattering of Hitchens, though the pond drew the line at angry Dawkins - but this was what started it ...

 

 

There was also some light comedy, because Seth Andrews started out as something of a preacher, and still has something of the Elmer Gantry about him ... it's the "my friends" that gives the Elmer in him away ...

 

Well, the pond promised a break from the usual reptile studies, and all that's left to wonder is how much of Hieronymus Bosch has found itself into modern cartooning ...

As always it's in the detail, including a clever person who has been far too date rape drug cleverly of late ...

Each day the pond walks past a couple of 3D toy figures it picked up while exiting via the gift store ...and if your browser can handle the pace there's a giant sized version of the painting here (warning, it is huge, and very slow to load, but which allows an inspection in detail of sundry earthly delights ...)