A 33-minute video talk from October 2012, by Gary Hall of Coventry University, “The Humanities and Open Access: Opportunities and Challenges”. He gets past the preamble and starts talking about the projects at 13:30.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3YffuzOrDU&w=420&h=315]

PhD Comics has a handy new “Open Access Explained!” video, albeit with a science focus…

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5rVH1KGBCY&w=420&h=315]

The Open Monograph Press (OMP) software-based system has been released. It’s similar to the various open ejournal publishing systems, but it’s for open scholarly ebooks…

“OMP is an open source software platform for managing the editorial workflow required to see monographs, edited volumes and, scholarly editions through internal and external review, editing, cataloguing, production, and publication. OMP will operate, as well, as a press website with catalog, distribution, and sales capacities.”

Final production formats are currently print, PDF, and ePub. No sign of elegantly formatted HTML chapters / Kindle .MOBI yet, but hopefully that will come in time.

Why your new ejournal or website should not look too slick…

“When we watch people try to complete tasks on websites we notice that often the more visually appealing something is, the more they ignore it. If it looks like marketing or an ad, then people dismiss it as having low value or credibility. In the eyes of many customers, ugly equals authentic and credible. Ugly helps you get the task completed quickly without any fuss or distraction. Ugly is going to give you the details. Ugly is not hiding anything. Ugly does not waste your time on surface images and trivial jargon and hype.”

And yet, on the other hand, any Web design that shrieks “generic old-school blog template” will trigger the preconceptions arising from the over-use of such templates on spam blogs. The ideal is perhaps to be relatively plain/simple on the landing page, but also to tweak the template so as to display small carefully-crafted human touches in the design and layout.

Many open ejournals do pretty well on the ugly/authentic score. But some loose points with visitors by saying “here’s a naff 400px picture of this issue’s journal cover, click on it to see the table of contents”. That’s an annoying time-waster and means it can take as many as four clicks to get from the front page to an actual article. If you really must inflict a picture cover on readers, then stick it at the side of — or even behind — the table-of-contents. Ideally, also pay someone on Fivver to actually design your cover, and ensure they know something about typography, layout, and picture-research in the public domain.