It's time for "pushmi-pullyu" open access: servicing the distinct needs of readers and authors

The open access movement has failed. Self-archiving and open-access journals are struggling to deliver 100% open access and probably never will. Moreover, readers, the curious minds it was hoped research would be opened to, have been marginalised from the debate. Toby Green suggests an unbundling of the often disparate, distinct services required by readers and authors; a new model for scholarly communications based on Doctor Dolittle’s “pushmi-pullyu”. The specific needs of authors preparing their papers and data for publication can be serviced on one side of the pushmi-pullyu; while on the other, freemium services ensure research is discoverable and readable by all, without payment, and a premium layer of reader-focused services ensures the evolving needs of readers are met

Covid-19: Medicine and Colonialism, Past and Present

This essay begins in the past, with the hope of developing a different way of thinking through the transformations of the present. Many commentators and media outlets have referred to the era of the Covid-19 pandemic as ‘unprecedented’, but there is nothing unprecedented about a pandemic. What seem unprecedented are the measures which have been taken to control the public, measures that have been implemented via a series of states of emergency: the exercise of medical power through the vehicle of the neoliberal state did lead to a pattern of state and society which was unprecedented in democratic states. On the other hand, and as I will argue in this essay, this relationship was certainly not unprecedented when it came to the history of the Western state in Africa. In fact, when we take the perspective of medical history and its relationship with colonial power, we can historicise more easily the transformations which have taken place during the Covid-19 pandemic. *** Image Credit: A medical officer taking a sample of blood from an inhabitant of Buruma Island, suffering from sleeping sickness. Photograph, 1965, after photograph 1902. In 1901, a severe sleeping sickness epidemic in Uganda claimed more than 20,000 lives. The first Uganda Sleeping Sickness Commission went out from the London School of Tropical medicine, the senior member was Dr Cuthbert Christy. It also included Dr Carmichael Low and Count Aldo Castellani. The album, which consists of copy photographs, was sent to Dr Poynter at the Wellcome Institute library by Professor Foster from the Department of Medical Microbiology in Uganda, in 1965. It was put together to record Foster's comments on the photographs sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis), an infectious disease which affects the fluid of the spinal cord, causing lethargy and loss of physical function. In Uganda it was passed most virulently by the bite of the tsetse fly. Created 1965. Contributors: Uganda Sleeping Sickness Commission. Meeting (1902).  https://www.lookandlearn.com/history-images/YW029102V/A-medical-officer-taking-a-sample-of-blood-from-an-inhabitant-of-Buruma-Island-suffering-from-sleeping-sickness 

O passado e o presente da África e Europa

Resenha de:BENNETT, Herman L.. African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic. Filadélfia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 240p

Doing precolonial african history in postcolonial times: a roundtable

O objetivo deste artigo é o de promover uma discussão de cunho historiográfico sobre o lugar de África nas histórias atlântica e imperial. O debate gira em torno de um conjunto de questões: como colocar a África num lugar mais central da investigação histórica? Como cruzar a historiografia dedicada ao continente africano com aquela que trata das diásporas africanas? Qual tem sido a contribuição da historiografia portuguesa para o estudo da África pré-colonial? Qual é o significado e a utilidade da "África lusófona" como conceito e como campo de estudos? Qual o futuro da investigação sobre a África pré-colonial em termos de dificuldades, oportunidades e prioridades? Os três historiadores convidados para esta mesa-redonda não apresentam respostas definitivas para estas questões, mas abrem caminho para uma reflexão mais aprofundada.This debate article aims to promote a historiographical discussion on the place of Africa in Atlantic and imperial history. The debate revolves around a set of questions: how to bring Africa to the centre of historical research? How close or how distant is the historiography that focuses on the African continent and the one that deals with the African diasporas? What has been the contribution of Portuguese scholarship to the study of precolonial African history? What is the meaning and usefulness of "Lusophone Africa" as a concept and as a field of study? What future for research on precolonial Africa in terms of constraints, opportunities, and priorities? The three historians invited to this roundtable do not provide definitive answers to these questions, but they open the way for a deeper reflection

From "commodities-currencies" to Covid loans: Africa and global inequality, past and present

This article focuses on the question of Africa and global inequalities, bridging research in the past with the experience of the present. It argues that frameworks of indebtedness and growing inequalities have characterized the African continent’s relationship with globalization at times of structural socioeconomic crisis. This was true in the early modern period, and can also be seen to characterize the macroeconomic framework of the two years of the covid-19 pandemic. Understanding the pandemic response through a structural and longue durée economic perspective opens up new avenues of interpretation and shows the importance of perspectives from the humanities and social sciences in shaping pandemic responses. Comparative historical approaches, socioeconomic continuities, and the critique of power provided by non-STEM subjects are shown to be vital in shaping a more holistic understanding of the pandemic time, and of how to respond to future pandemics.Este artigo enfoca a questão da África e das desigualdades globais, unindo a pesquisa do passado com a experiência do presente. Argumenta que quadros de endividamento e desigualdades crescentes têm caracterizado a relação do continente africano com a globalização em tempos de crise socioeconômica estrutural. Isso já era verdade no início do período moderno e pode ser visto novamente no quadro macroeconômico dos dois anos da pandemia de covid-19. Compreender a resposta à pandemia por meio de uma perspectiva econômica estrutural e de longa duração abre novos caminhos de interpretação e mostra a importância das perspectivas das Ciências Humanas e sociais na formação das respostas à pandemia. Abordagens históricas comparativas, continuidades socioeconômicas e crítica ao poder fornecido por sujeitos situados fora da área de STEM (ciência, tecnologia, engenharia e matemática) se mostram vitais para moldar uma compreensão mais holística do período da pandemia e de como responder a futuras pandemias

Cities and citadels: an archaeology of inequality and economic growth

Cities and Citadels provides an urgent update of archaeology’s engagement with economic theory. Recent events have forced a major reassessment of economic thinking. In the wake of the 2008 Great Recession and the economic impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic, the world finds itself in unprecedented times. Even though archaeology typically concerns itself with the remote past, it must also help us understand how we got to where we are today. This book takes up the challenging new theories of scholars like Thomas Piketty, Mariana Mazzucato and David Graeber and explores their importance for the study of human economies in ancient and prehistoric contexts. Drawing on case studies from the Neolithic to the Classical Era and spanning the globe, the authors put forward a new narrative of economic change that is relevant to the 21st century. This book speaks to the study of economics in all ancient societies and is suitable for researchers of archaeology, economics, economic history and all related disciplines

Coloured rippling: An extension of a theorem proving heuristic

Rippling is a type of rewriting developed in inductive theorem proving for removing differences between terms; the induction conclusion is annotated to mark its differences from the induction hypothesis and rippling attempts to move these differences. Until now rippling has been primarily employed in proofs where there is a single induction hypothesis.This paper describes an extension to rippling to deal with theorems with multiple hypotheses.Such theorems arise, for instance, when reasoning about data-structures like trees with multiple recursive arguments. The essential idea is to colour the annotation, with each colour corresponding to a different hypothesis. The annotation of rewrite rules used in rippling is similarly generalized so that rules propagate colours through terms. This annotation guides search so that rewrite rules are only applied if they reduce the differences between the conclusion and some of the hypotheses.We have tested this implementation on a number of problems, including two of Bledsoe’s challenge limit theorems

A panel dataset of COVID-19 vaccination policies in 185 countries

We present a panel dataset of COVID-19 vaccine policies, with data from 01 January 2020 for 185 countries and a number of subnational jurisdictions, reporting on vaccination prioritization plans, eligibility and availability, cost to the individual and mandatory vaccination policies. For each of these indicators, we recorded who is targeted by a policy using 52 standardized categories. These indicators document a detailed picture of the unprecedented scale of international COVID-19 vaccination rollout and strategy, indicating which countries prioritized and vaccinated which groups, when and in what order. We highlight key descriptive findings from these data to demonstrate uses for the data and to encourage researchers and policymakers in future research and vaccination planning. Numerous patterns and trends begin to emerge. For example: ‘eliminator’ countries (those that aimed to prevent virus entry into the country and community transmission) tended to prioritize border workers and economic sectors, while ‘mitigator’ countries (those that aimed to reduce the impact of community transmission) tended to prioritize the elderly and healthcare sectors for the first COVID-19 vaccinations; high-income countries published prioritization plans and began vaccinations earlier than low- and middle-income countries. Fifty-five countries were found to have implemented at least one policy of mandatory vaccination. We also demonstrate the value of combining this data with vaccination uptake rates, vaccine supply and demand data, and with further COVID-19 epidemiological data

What would framework for policy responses to pandemic diseases look like?

This scoping paper discusses how information on government policy responses to pandemic diseases (e.g. non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and public health and social measures (PHSMs), and including behavioural rules, testing and contact tracing systems, policies to incentivise vaccination, etc.) have, can, and should be collected, analysed, and incorporated into the broader array of pandemic data (e.g. epidemiological, virological, behavioural, etc.) to build preparedness. It draws on both the academic and policy literature, as well as a series of interviews with policymakers and researchers, as well as a guided stakeholder workshop held in December 2022