Tim Elfenbein
@timelfen
Principal of Forthcoming LLC, a publishing consultancy; Member of @limnpress.bsky.social editorial collective; Researcher & practitioner of scholarly publishing; Digital explorer–analog sailor; Victim of meaning.
Hope you hit this cultural hot spot, in the food court near the ferry terminal.
Reading Edward Deci’s mid-90s pop-psychology book *Why We Do What We Do* for a reading group. It feels like a distillation of 20th C. liberal social science: trying to merge individual flourishing w/ managerial efficiency, effected through reform of how we talk, & “society” is a sus influence.
Finally getting to read Karen Strassler’s latest book, *Demanding Images.* I was the production editor for a bunch of great books on Indonesia when I was at DukeUP, including Karen’s first book, *Refracted Visions,* by the likes of Eben Kirksey, Abidin Kusno, & Rudolf Mrázek. Some of my favorites.
Saint Martin notes #23: Friday night karaoke: A group of inebriated Dutchmen butchers Gangstas Paradise while the Prime Minister of Sint Maarten (white shirt, by the dart board) looks on, sipping his bottle of beer.
Hey book/publishing studies peeps: Do you know the term for the page (usually the last before the back cover) inserted by print-on-demand printers. Such as 👇 (torn from the latest issue of Limn, where is was mistakenly placed as a middle page).
Actually, they were very precise, at least when it came to evaluating the Dyneema soft shackles & loops I was making.
I very much appreciate the precision of the guys in the running rigging shop.
If you are into sailboats, this place is pretty fantastic. My son takes sailing lessons near the Simpson Bay Bridge, so we get to see plenty of boats making the transit close up. This is from one bridge opening a few weeks ago, as the lagoon started to clear out for hurricane season.
We’ve now lived through an entire sailing reason here in Saint Martin, with several hundred boats stopping in Simpson Bay or the lagoon, everything from 30’ to 350’. We met at least 3 dozen cruising families at the beach bar. Hands down best boat name so far: What Up Fishes.
That figure in the blue shirt could very well be me racing a Sunfast with the wife & kid in the Lagoon Regatta at the Saint Martin Yacht Club. It was Iggy’s first regatta as crew: he did great.
So while this tool might provide useful support for editors to find certain things in their manuscripts, it does nothing for “editorial judgement at scale,” mainly because judgement doesn’t scale. Like most such tools, it can be useful for triage. But it also chips away at editorial judgement.
So, the problem of self-citations: determining when they are appropriate or excessive. The tool does 2 main things: identifies & locates instances of self-citation, then applies a “risk” score to each instance. This to promote consistency, speed, objectivity in editorial work, “at scale.”
And the only way we can scrutinize whether RORATION has achieve "genuine community ownership" is if we *see the detailed terms of the partnership* w/ T&F. Many in the ROR community have been around the block w/ lots of presses, including establishing their own. Some of us know things abt pub deals.
2) "T&F provides ... infrastructure, while ... IP, governance & editorial independence remain w/ RORATION" This isn't a clean tradeoff. Infrastructure ends up doing governance on the sly, which is why thoughtful commentators argue that open doesn't work w/o open infrastructure. This is the trap.
Pointing, for no particular reason, to this deeply illuminating exchange between Barbara Herrnstein Smith & Paul Boghossian, published in SAQ back in 2002. read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlant...
Here’s how I’ve written abt publishing arrangements as compromise👇. I think my differences w/ the JROR editors is only partly over what can & can’t be lived with. I believe there were arrangements that would have made the compromises less acute.
Saint Martin notes #18: A local charter company that gives nudist guests a discount.
Today at the shop I helped splice together then dress a new mast. It was shipped to SXM in a 30 ft crate, which probably wasn’t cheap but still cheaper than sending a 60 ft crate.
I read the entire, quite comprehensive, page before inquiring into who was providing it. It’s a blog post from something called OpenExamPrep. There’s no About page, just a short My Story section on the front page about Ran Chen, Founder, on his wish to democratize professional exam prep w/ AI.