OA, no way

Yesterday, at the very same time (4.33pm) that I was in a meeting discussing the virtues of open access publishing, I was informed that, due to funding pressures, my institution was no longer covering the cost of open access publication, unless (one of) the author(s) was full staff (or externally funded). Since I’m neither employed nor funded, my publications will no longer be open access, unless the publication itself is open access.

Antiquities collectors must be mindful of potential complicity in human rights abuses

The humanitarian and cultural crisis in the Middle East is so urgent that the editor of the International Journal of Cultural Property, Alexander Bauer, has broken his years-long (editorial) silence and published a statement on the destruction of heritage in Syria and Iraq and its implications, which is worth reading in its entirety. He opens by addressing the problem of the “rescue”-by-purchase of conflict antiquities:

Collectors of antiquities must therefore be mindful of their potential complicity in supporting groups such as IS, and that rather than “saving” heritage, collecting objects with questionable provenance (from northern Mesopotamia at least) might in fact serve to support IS’s violent and destructive agenda.

Interpol did not claim that Islamic State made $100m-a-year from conflict antiquities

Last Tuesday, I doubted Interpol had said or could have known that ‘Islamic State pockets $100 million yearly from heritage booty [conflict antiquities]’. Unsurprisingly, Interpol did not say that (at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) or anywhere else) and does not know that.