{"id":1187,"date":"2019-10-22T09:08:27","date_gmt":"2019-10-22T08:08:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/?p=1187"},"modified":"2023-04-27T09:21:41","modified_gmt":"2023-04-27T08:21:41","slug":"im-an-open-book-or-why-everyone-can-now-share-my-interest-in-thick-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/2019\/10\/22\/im-an-open-book-or-why-everyone-can-now-share-my-interest-in-thick-things\/","title":{"rendered":"I’m An Open Book, or: Why Everyone Can Now Share My Interest In Thick Things"},"content":{"rendered":"

In November 2017 I published\u00a0Thick Evaluation<\/em>, a monograph with Oxford University Press.*\u00a0\u201cHow exciting,”\u00a0I hear you cry, “the world needs more academic books!”\u00a0But, honestly, it was exciting, and not just because my family and I\u00a0cried tears of joy after I finally got it out the way.\u00a0Thick Evaluation<\/em>\u00a0was\u00a0the first OUP philosophy monograph\u00a0to be made open access, certainly out of the main UK office.\u00a0OUP is adding to its stock of open access monographs every month.\u00a0The whole process of writing and copy-editing\u00a0Thick Evaluation<\/em>\u00a0was pretty\u00a0much the same as with any other book.\u00a0The only difference is that the full and final work is available as a pdf which anyone, anywhere can read, download and print.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Why publish open access?\u00a0Well, simply because\u00a0I wanted my work to reach as many people as possible and I believe that academics’\u00a0thoughts and discoveries should be shared across the world.\u00a0As well as appearing on the OUP main site (link below)\u00a0it appears in the Kent Academic Repository<\/a>.\u00a0OUP keeps a list of who accesses and reads Thick Evaluation<\/em>\u00a0from their main site, and I get data every year.\u00a0Interestingly, even though\u00a0Thick Evaluation<\/em>\u00a0is open access and hence free, my royalties – i.e. monies from\u00a0copies of the book that are sold in the traditional manner\u00a0–\u00a0have been higher than anything else I have published.\u00a0There’s nothing like free advertising! Of course, it wasn’t\u00a0quite<\/em>\u00a0free.\u00a0I’m very grateful to Kent for paying OUP money to publish\u00a0Thick Evaluation<\/em>\u00a0open access.\u00a0Costs change all the time, as does the amount of money Kent has for such ventures.\u00a0But if you are applying to the right type of\u00a0grant scheme, I recommend you investigate publishing any books open access and putting in a bid to do so as part of your grant\u00a0proposal.<\/p>\n

Thick Evaluation<\/em>\u00a0is published under a Creative Commons licence, specifically a\u00a0CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 international licence. If you want to know more about creative commons, please read here<\/a>. Also, see the university webpages on copyright<\/a>, and the copyright literacy blog<\/a>, or contact Chris Morrison, the university’s copyright guru:\u00a0copyright@kent.ac.uk<\/a><\/p>\n

If you want to, you can\u00a0read\u00a0Thick Evaluation<\/em>\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

*Oh, okay then. If you\u00a0really<\/em>\u00a0want to know what it’s about…..there’s an important distinction made by philosophers and others between two sorts of evaluative concepts and terms, that between\u00a0thin<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0thick<\/em> concepts and terms. Thin concepts include concepts such as Good and Bad, Right and Wrong, concepts that seem to be wholly (or mostly) evaluative of the world, but don’t carry any, (or barely any), specific description of what the world is like. Thick concepts, on the other hand, are more specific and descriptive of the world, yet at the same time carry evaluative overtones. Think of Barbaric, Compassionate, Elegant, Grotesque, Ignorant, Just, Thin-Skinned, and so on. This distinction raises many questions. What do we really mean by evaluation and description? Is there a sharp line between the two? Is there a sharp line between thin and thick concepts in the first place: is it really<\/em>\u00a0a distinction? What does this distinction tell us about the nature of everyday evaluative practices and how we can understand other people?\u00a0What do thin and thick concepts tell us about the nature of concepts and thought?\u00a0Thick Evaluation<\/em>\u00a0is one of the first book-length treatments of the topic and in it I argue for a radically liberal notion of what evaluation is and could be.\u00a0Plus there are a few jokes. Even if you read it open access, there’s nothing like a hardback\u00a0version – c’mon, people, think of my royalties\u00a0–\u00a0so please buy a copy for your family this\u00a0Christmas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In November 2017 I published\u00a0Thick Evaluation, a monograph with Oxford University Press.*\u00a0\u201cHow exciting,”\u00a0I hear you cry, “the world needs more academic books!”\u00a0But, honestly, it was … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40095,"featured_media":1188,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[257583,9663,278468],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1187"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40095"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1187"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1190,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1187\/revisions\/1190"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}