On this last Theme Thursday of the 2017-2018 academic year, we consider a quiet revolution happening within academic publishing. The publishing revolutionaries aim to make all publicly funded research – and possibly all research – freely available to any curious reader. This is in contrast to the current conventional publishing model in which researchers use grant money to conduct studies, which are then published in an academic journal that is funded by journal subscriptions. The radical change, which has been discussed in previously smoke-filled rooms in universities and publishing houses alike for at least the past 10 years, is being driven by weighty institutions such as the National Science Foundation.

Only occasionally does the matter enter the consciousness of those outside the arena, as it did for example at the end of last year, when a recent Nobel Prize winner called for academics to stop submitting their work to the pukka journals such as Cell, Nature and Science. Dr Randy Schekman, who runs a laboratory at the University of California, called for the boycott because he believes researchers and scientists are being inappropriately influenced by the need to get their work disseminated by these prestigious publications. He also claimed that the top-flight journals, aware of their prestigious position, artificially restrict the number of papers they accept.

At first sight the change to so-called open access might not seem so revolutionary; surely scientific research should be freely available to all? What really is the big deal? The answer, in part at least, is vast sums. Elsevier, the world’s largest academic journal publisher – producing more than 90 journals including The Lancet as well as several others aimed at psychiatrists and allied professionals (e.g. Schizophrenia Research, Biological Psychiatry and Psychiatric Research) – in 2012 had a margin of 38% on revenues over $2 billion. Similarly, in 2011, German-owned Springer, which acquired BioMed Central in 2008, made 36% on sales of almost $9 million.

Here are a couple resources in Ames worth your time, to help you catch up on issues related to Open Access and scholarly publishing.

Opening science: The evolving guide on how the Internet is changing research, collaboration and scholarly publishing, by Sönke Bartling [and] Sascha Friesike, editors

The state of scholarly publishing: Challenges and opportunities, Albert N. Greco, editor

Digitize this book!: The politics of new media, or why we need open access now, by Gary Hall

Open access: What you need to know now, by Walt Crawford

The access principle: The case for open access to research and scholarship, by John Willinsky

Why does this matter to you? One thing your tuition dollars help support are subscriptions to databases and journals. All those times you Google an article or access something on campus (or off-campus with your campus ID and password), you’re accessing materials the library pays for through agreements. So you benefit when materials are more broadly available.

It’s the end of the semester. We’re all tired and stressed out and just about done with learning. So let’s take a break from all that with a bit of comedy.

Consider this text to help you get through the next few days.

Women’s Comedic Art as Social Revolution: Five performers and the lessons of their subversive humor

Though comic women have existed since the days of Baubo, the mythic figure of sexual humor, they have been neglected by scholars and critics. This pioneering volume tells the stories of five women who have created revolutionary forms of comic performance and discourse that defy prejudice. The artists include 16th-century performer Isabella Andreini, 17th-century improviser Caterina Biancolelli, 20th-century Italian playwright Franca Rame, and contemporary performance artists Deb Margolin and Kimberly Dark. All create humor that subverts patriarchal attitudes, conventional gender roles, and stereotypical images. The book ends with a practical guide for performers and teachers of theater.

Every year, hundreds of new words and phrases that come from internet slang are added to the dictionary.

Some of them are abbreviations, like FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and YOLO (You Only Live Once). Others are words that have been stretched into more parts of speech than originally intended — like when “trend” became a verb (“It’s trending worldwide”). Others still have emerged as we adapt our language to new technologies; think “crowdfunding,” “selfie,” “cyberbullying.”

You might notice how many of these “new” words are actually just appropriated, meaning they are pre-existing words that are combined or given entirely new meanings. For example, “social network” became a word in the Oxford English Dictionary back in 1973, referring to the physical activity of networking in a social atmosphere. In the 1990s, people began using the term to refer to virtual engagement, and that became an official definition in 1998.

For Theme Thursday this week we think about the evolution of language.

Slang and Sociability: In-Group Language among College Students by Connie Eble

Juba to jive: A dictionary of African-American slang, edited and with an introduction by Clarence Major

Slang from Shakespeare: Together with literary expressions, compiled by Anderson M. Baten

Dictionary of Afro-American slang by Clarence Major

Green’s dictionary of slang, by Jonathon Green

The Oxford dictionary of modern slang, by John Ayto and John Simpson

The seeds of speech: Language origin and evolution, by Jean Aitchison

Eve spoke: Human language and human evolution, by Philip Lieberman

The domestication of language: Cultural evolution and the uniqueness of the human animal, by Daniel Cloud

Tools, language, and cognition in human evolution, edited by Kathleen R. Gibson and Tim Ingold

Distance education and languages: Evolution and change, edited by B”orje Holmberg, Monica Shelley and Cynthia White

The ape that spoke: Language and the evolution of the human mind, by John McCrone

Interested in more? Watch this series, available through Kanopy. Speaking in Tongues: The History of Language is a 5 part series. Currently there are more than 6,000 languages spoken around the world. This five-part series traces the history and evolution of language and attendant theories and controversies while evaluating the scope of linguistic diversity, the dissemination of language, the expansion of language into written form, and the life cycle of language. Prominent figures in the field of linguistics–Noam Chomsky, John McWhorter, and Peter Ladefoged, to name only three–are featured.