Year: 2009

Dishonest academic journals and the Elsevier scandal

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Nick Nicholas’ blog also drew my attention to a scandal; a major academic publisher, Elsevier, running “fake” academic journals, which were in fact funded by a pharmaceutical company.  How bad this may be, well, I can’t tell.

Librarians — who pay for journal access, remember — are reacting strongly to this threat to the integrity of the journal system, and quite rightly too.  After all, if you can’t trust the publishers to act as gatekeepers — to keep out the rubbish and the advertising-pretending-to-be-research, your scientific research is screwed.  Terms like “corruption” have been used, and quite properly.

Such scandals undermine the reputation of the journal system.  In truth I think this is a minor hiccup.  Too many people have too much invested in the existing system for it all to go to hell very easily.

But Nick looks at the long-term trend, and how this incident may influence it (paragraphing mine).

The world is upside down, and will only get more so. If it’s not googleable, it doesn’t exist.

That’s calling much of the scholarly publishing market into question, and the medical payola scandal at Elsevier calls into question the remainder. Just found out about this today, and I’m still in shock.

Journal publishers don’t disseminate as broadly as a PDF on a website + google, and no-one cares about long-term availability anymore (not even the publishers, shirking away from paper).

Scholarly publishers’ key selling point now is their imprimatur, and once you piss that away through payola, you don’t recoup the loss of authority by blaming a rogue Australian subbranch, with staff who’ve since left your employ.

The future is… what?  Well, we don’t know.  But it won’t be paper-based journals, that’s for sure.

Share

An new hero takes on the ancient astronomical works

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve just discovered http://www.wilbourhall.org/index.html.  This site deals with Mathematics, and Mathematical Astronomy in the works of ancient writers.  It does so by getting hold of whatever texts exist and fixing the errors in the Google scans and so forth.  If you want the complete works of Hero of Alexandria, they’re here.  Archimedes, Ptolemy… likewise.  Arabic writers?  They too.  The author, Joe Leichter, writes:

I hope to make available public domain materials that are essential for the study of ancient and early modern mathematics and mathematical astronomy. Google, for example, has done some things to achieve this through its books.google.com project. However, like most other efforts at digitally copying non digital materials, “mistakes were made”. For example, Google currently has several (all incomplete) versions of Teubner’s’s edition of Euclid available for download. Most of these unfortunately contain page after page that are illegible, missing, out of order or otherwise unusable.

The man is a hero.  Ancient scientific works are a horrendously neglected part of the ancient world, because they require skills and interest in both the humanities and the sciences.  Still more neglected are the Byzantine writers on this subject.

All this from a blog that I had not seen before, opuculuk by Nick Nicholas, reporting on a search that he did on the works of Chioniades.  (Nick works for the TLG, and was working on their lemmatizer, when he started to come across chunks of untranslated Arabic in the scientific works of Chioniades.  Mr. C., a 12th century writer, had been taking lessons from some Persian, so had got a whole load of jargon for his pains!)

Share

A pause in correspondance

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Sorry to anyone waiting for an email reply from me — I’ve got a bug, and I’m not well enough to do much.  I’ll catch up on everything in a day or two.

Share

Origen translation: the catena issue

Posted on by Roger Pearse

All of the Latin of homily 1 on Ezechiel is now translated into English, and pretty much finalised.  But an issue has arisen.  Extracts of Origen’s original Greek exist in the medieval Greek commentaries, comprised as they are of chains (catenas) of extracts from the fathers.  These are printed where relevant at the bottom of Baehrens’ edition in the Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller edition.  But we have discovered that the extracts printed in the older Patrologia Graeca edition are fuller.  What do we do?

Do we just translate what Baehrens printed, presuming that he rejected the rest as inauthentic; or do we use the longer text?  We need to find out what Baehrens thought he was doing, if he tells us.

One thing that would help would be to consult the full text of the catena.  But of course this is very difficult.  Catenas do exist in print, but in general we just don’t have proper accessible editions of the major catenas.  This is a barrier, not merely to patristics, but also to biblical studies.

To edit one of these sprawling monsters must be difficult; but why don’t people have a go?

Share

A famous passage of Gregory of Nyssa… but where from?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Everyone has read this:

Everywhere, in the public squares, at crossroads, on the streets and lanes, people would stop you and discourse at random about the Trinity. If you asked something of a moneychanger, he would begin discussing the question of the Begotten and the Unbegotten. If you questioned a baker about the price of bread, he would answer that the Father is greater and the Son is subordinate to Him. If you went to take a bath, the Anomoean bath attendant would tell you that in his opinion the Son simply comes from nothing.

But… where in his works does Gregory of Nyssa say this?  And does an English translation exist?

UPDATE: From the discussion in the comments (which includes the Greek), I learn that the work is his Oratio de deitate Filii et Spiriti Sancti, (= Oration on the deity of the Son and of the Holy Spirit) which is printed in PG 46, and the passage is on col. 557, section B.   (It’s in the modern 1996 edition of Gregory’s works also, but of course no normal person would have access to that.[1])  An offline (!) German translation of the whole treatise exists in V. H. Drecoll and M. Berghaus (eds.), Gregory of Nyssa : The Minor Treatises on Trinitarian Theology and Apollinarism (Brill 2011).  But … a complete French translation exists, made by Matthieu Cassin, and is online! The direct link is here, and a PDF at the bottom contains the whole article. Our phrase is on p.11 of the PDF, p.591 of the article.   (For those without French, be aware that Google Translate does French-to-English very well.)  Thank you to everyone who contributed!

Share
  1. [1]“De deitate filii et spiritus sancti et in Abraham” in Gregorii Nysseni Opera vol. X part 2 (ed. E. Rhein), Brill, 1996.↩

UK Govt attack on Catholic adoption agency continues

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Cranmer has the following piece on one of the Catholic adoption agencies which went to court to defend their right not to place children with gay couples, in accordance with Catholic teaching.  They lost, and got a £75,000 bill for their pains.

Passing laws to allow bigots to drag Christians into court on one pretext or another is almost a fingerprint-test for a repressive regime.  Apparently laws to allow gay activists to do this are being passed at the moment.

I wonder if I will get dragged into court?  After all, I think sodomy is a sin too; I and 2bn other Christians. 

Share

Irving Woodworth Raymond and Orosius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The first English translation of Orosius was made by I.W.Raymond and published in 1936.  It’s probably still in copyright in the USA, unfortunately, which keeps it off the web.  A later translation exists in the Fathers of the Church series.

Someone wrote to me about Orosius today.  Apparently he is the first writer to mention the term “Asia minor”.  This led me to look again at the copyright.

When did Raymond die? (he was born in 1898, according to COPAC)  A google search led me to an obituary in the St. Petersburg Times, August 11, 1964:

NEW YORK — Dr Irving Woodworth Raymond, 65, professor of history at Brooklyn college here, died Monday at his home in York Harbor, Maine.

Isn’t Google books wonderful?  I remarked yesterday how the British Library, in putting newspapers online, made sure to charge for access; Google gives it to us for free, and we all benefit.

Sadly it looks as if his work won’t come out of copyright in the EU (life+70 years) until 2034, by which time I will be dead myself, I suspect.  In countries with life+50 years, that reduces to 2014.  And I can’t tell you when it comes out of copyright in the US, as I don’t understand the current situation; publication + 95 years, i.e. 2031?

What a mess this copyright law is!  Who benefits from keeping this offline?

Share

Perseus hopper – 157 downloads

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The source code for the Perseus site is available for download at Sourceforge, and contains all the data too.  I was mildly surprised to discover that it has been downloaded, according to Sourceforge… 157 times.

That sounds very low indeed.  Only 157 downloads since it went open source?

Admittedly it’s very hard going to make sense of, and won’t run on Windows, but even so.

Share

British Library still doesn’t get it

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The BBC has a belated but fawning story today, Just click for a century of news:

The British Library has put two million digitised pages from 19th century newspapers online, taking research out of its dusty reading rooms into people’s homes.

The pay-as-you-go service brings a century of history alive from Jack the Ripper to WC Grace. (etc)

Ah.  So, “just click”, eh?  What use is this to most of us?  Access for the privileged only, it seems.  Can you imagine any of us paying for this? 

But there is more, and worse, at the British Library site, where the new government “Digital Britain” report is discussed.

Digitising content

Dame Lynne said: “I welcome the fact that Lord Carter specifically referenced the British Library’s Nineteenth British Century Newspapers digitisation programme as an example of how new business models can enable national institutions to work with commercial partners and funding bodies to make millions of pages of historic content available online to researchers and the public. We are sitting on a goldmine of content which should be considered integral to the UK’s digital strategy. To support Digital Britain we need to deliver a critical mass of digitised content – sustained public investment, along with the innovative business models cited in Lord Carter’s report, will enable us to achieve this.”

I’ll bet she does.   Who else would endorse the idea of selling access, but the man who has just proposed taxing internet access? 

The reference to access for  “the public” is tacked on, as an afterthought.  The British Library, indeed, doesn’t exist to serve the public — in the opinion of all too many of its staff.  The vision of universal access to information and education is debased into a vision of more income for themselves.

There needs to be a culture change at the British Library.  The people who see the collection purely as a windfall to be exploited for their own budgetary gain need to be eased out.   An open-source public service attitude needs to replace it.  And it will.

It’s easy to get depressed by how out of touch the management of the British Library is.  Yet the pressure for open access grows stronger all the time.  The very idea of charging for this will seem absurd or disgusting in 10 years time.  Every year a flood of new staff will enter the British Library, carrying their iPhones with their built-in digital cameras and their WiFi-enabled devices of various sorts; and will try not to laugh at the policies they find.  These people will bring about the revolution.

Share

Origen, Homily 1 on Ezekiel now translated

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The first sermon in Origen’s Homilies on Ezekiel is pretty long.  But the whole thing has now been translated, at least in draft.  This is very good news, and means that we’re making real progress.  Most of the other sermons are much shorter.

Share