The View from Zenodo

A number of my writings are available in PDF format at the CERN based Open Access repository Zenodo.

Why Zenodo? The repository is named after the first librarian of the Library of Alexandria, Zenodotus, whose floruit was around 280 B.C.E., and whose principal interest was editing Homer. He also introduced library metadata, which made it easier to know what was in a scroll, and where in the library it belonged. CERN has always been conscious of the importance of good metadata for the efficient management of information, so their choice of name is a good one. 

As you can see, the first articles were uploaded over a couple of days in 2018, but I didn't draw attention to them at the time because access stats were not available. Now the access stats are publicly available for each file. If you search the repository with the string: 'Yaeger, Thomas', all of the files will appear on a single page. There is also a fuller description available from the repository for each file, a DOI, and versioning information.

 The available writings are:

Magic or Magia?

Yaeger, Thomas

A discussion of the arguments in Plato's Sophist concerning the nature of what is real, and of the implications of the apparent conclusion that the One, as well as being unchanging, is also subject to change.
Uploaded on June 2, 2019 http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3237026

Language and Abstraction in Egypt and Greece

Yaeger, Thomas

A brief summary and analysis of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena Vol 3 (2006), from August 2013. This is a section from the forthcoming book Around Black Athena: The Origins of Graeco-Roman Culture
Uploaded on May 15, 2018 https://zenodo.org/record/1247369


The Babylonian Creation

Yaeger, Thomas

The text of the Enuma Elish ('When on High' )was closely connected with the observance of the New Year’s Festival at Babylon, and it was recited at the end of the fourth day of this celebration. This Festival lasted from the first to the eleventh of the month Nisan. The Enuma Elish...

Uploaded on May 16, 2018 https://zenodo.org/record/1247957


Frazer and the Association of Ideas

Yaeger, Thomas

Frazer devised an explanatory mechanism to explain patterns of magical thought in antiquity. This was based on the phenomenon of the association of ideas, argued by John Locke in the seventeenth century as a description of how we think. Applying this to human behaviour across history and culture...

Uploaded on May 15, 2018 https://zenodo.org/record/1247491


Standing in the Place of Ea

Yaeger, Thomas

'Standing in the Place of Ea' is a chapter in the book Understanding Ancient Thought. It explores the role of the King in ancient Assyria, as the vizier of the god Assur. He was trained in the Adapa discipline, which is related to the myth of Adapa. He was required to be skilled in crafts...

Uploaded on May 15, 2018 https://zenodo.org/record/1247346


Ocean and the Limit of Existence

Yaeger, Thomas

A chapter from the book, The Sacred History of Being, which explores the origins of philosophy in divine cult. Ideas about water and ocean were held in common around the Mediterranean in the first and second millennia B.C.E. These ideas are associated with creation and the generation of life...

Uploaded on May 15, 2018 https://zenodo.org/record/1247311


The Fifty Names of Marduk

Yaeger, Thomas

The liturgy of the Babylonian creation myth, performed each year by the King and the priests, tells us about the intellectual frame of their world, as it was then understood. The physical world is a place of refuge, created by the gods to ensure the well-being of human life. The King is...

Uploaded on May 15, 2018 https://zenodo.org/record/1247517


'I and Thou'

Yaeger, Thomas

It has been argued, essentially following the Frazerian model of antiquity, [Before Philosophy, Henri Frankfort, et al.] that, among ancient cultures the world was conceived as a place populated entirely by entities, so that relation with the things in the world was essentially understood in terms of...

Uploaded on May 16, 2018 https://zenodo.org/record/1248022


Being, Kabbalah, and the Assyrian Sacred Tree

Yaeger, Thomas

One of the reasons for the current convention that philosophy began in Greece is a purely formal one, in that historians of western thought have taken the view that we have no direct evidence of the discussion of philosophical matters from any other cultural context (other than the Greek oikumene)...

Uploaded on May 15, 2018 https://zenodo.org/record/1247536

May 16, 2019, and June 4 2019, TY.


The Ka and Totality in Ancient Egypt

Yaeger, Thomas

A speculative article on the significance of the Ka in Egyptian Thought. The article explores the idea that the Ka arises from fundamental questions about the nature of reality.

Uploaded September 1, 2019. At: https://zenodo.org/record/3383059#.XWupCi5Ki03 TY

An Uneven Distribution: Research and Scholarly Resources in the 21st Century (I)

There are lots of digital resources out there for scholars and students of ancient history and ancient languages, which are my main interests. A really useful searchable version of the classic Liddell and Scott Greek lexicon for example, and the wonderful resources at the Perseus project; the electronic corpus of Sumerian literature at Oxford (ETCSL), The Sumerian Dictionary at the University of Pennsylvania (PSD), the Melammu database on Assyria and Babylonia at the University of Helsinki,  the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, (TLG), which gives access to the whole corpus of Greek literature from Homer onwards to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 CE, and so on. Most of which I had occasion to use in the course of writing The Sacred History of Being.

My bread and butter for many years was in scholarly communications – we built and ran repositories and encouraged open access deposit of scholarly papers in those repositories. Open access, for anyone who doesn’t know, is an important subset of digital publishing, which is about improving the circulation and use of research by taking it from behind a publisher paywall, where possible.

The presence of papers available on open access terms with the appropriate licenses has been invaluable for many researchers, including myself. The physics community knows this better than any other part of academia, since they have had the facilities to upload their papers to Paul Ginsparg’s Arxiv, formerly run as a site using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), a repository of electronic preprints (note the archaic description!) originally based at Los Alamos from 1991, and at Cornell since 2004 . Papers are available via a searchable interface shortly after uploading. CERN has also maintained an active repository in High Energy Physics for many years. To some significant extent, the Web itself owes the necessity of its invention to the need to find an easy way to organise and disseminate the large collection of papers generated by the research done at CERN.

The publishing community naturally was not very happy about the idea, when it began to be more generally promoted as a solution to a number of problems in contemporary scholarly communication, since it threatened the subscription fees that the publishers charge the academic libraries, if all research was to end up freely available in institutional repositories, or otherwise on author websites. Without those subscription fees, commercial publishing would find itself largely cut adrift from the academic business of doing research, and disseminating that research.

In the early days, some minor concessions were made by the publishing community, in that they would perhaps offer a downloadable unformatted version of a paper in addition to the formally published paper, behind a paywall. Sometimes ‘unformatted’ was taken to extremes, so that the papers were virtually unreadable. Formatting information was present visibly in the text, cluttering the view, but not contributing anything useful to the documents.

Formatting became the thing that the publishers clung on to, as their main value-added contribution to the publishing process, in addition to copy-editing and the organisation of peer-review. They also clung to the practice of authors signing away their copyright in the published articles as part of the acceptance of the article for publication. So along the way we ended up with distinctions being made between preprints and post-prints; the author’s final copy, and the publisher’s final copy; green and gold routes to open access publication; and the invention of rules concerning what authors and institutions could and couldn’t do with these different versions. From the publisher point of view, they argued that what they were doing was maintaining the integrity and quality of the publishing process, and their important role in that. Then we ended up with the invention of article processing charges, which attempted to envelop the research publication process entirely within publisher dictated assessments of cost.

Naturally I’ve compressed a number of years of development in the foregoing, but that is the broad shape of the struggle which has developed since the late 1990s. The publishing community cannot be blamed for attempting to protect their interests, but ultimately it seems to be obvious that research should not be a free resource for publishers which can be used to extract increasingly expensive subscriptions from university libraries. In theory at least, it should be about the quality of scholarship, and its dissemination.

Unfortunately that is not the perspective of many university administrators and senior academics. Early on in the progress of open access, it became possible to see how the community would divide. We spent a lot of time talking to senior academics, with the idea that if we persuaded them of worth of the open access idea, they would encourage their research students to stop signing away their copyrights, and to deposit their work in institutional repositories. Some were interested. Others responded with the specious objection that If they wanted a paper to make an impact they would submit it to Nature, or another publication of similar status. As if we were suggesting that no-one should submit papers to high status, high-impact publications. But that fracture in the nature of the response was a phenomenon which should have told us something important about how senior academics understand publishing, and how open access would fare in succeeding years. It’s about status and its modern double, research funding.

Eventually open access began to be promoted as an aspect of institutional reputation management, which of course is about how an institution and its component faculties and departments are perceived. Of course a perception of quality is not necessarily the same thing as quality itself, so reputation management is more problematic than a real assessment of research output. Publish or perish was an attitude which was already well established In UK academia however, and reputation management became another way to raise an institutional profile, even if the quality of the research was not clarified by doing this. ‘Width’ was also important.

A little later, repository technology was spotted as a way of automating the submission of a sample of research papers in what was called the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). So the deposit of papers in a repository became an important part of the way in which universities would be assessed for research funding. Open access was now about academics not keeping research information (and their papers) hidden away in their departmental records, but making them available to the institution as a whole, as a component of both the institution’s reputation management, and its pursuit of research funding.

So open access, and the associated technology, in the end became an adjunct to the already established importance of reputational status and the acquisition of government research income for the universities. Yet it still isn’t regarded as a proper publishing route.  Is this a strange state of affairs? I think it is, and I will write about this  in my next post. 

Thomas Yaeger, March 2016