The last few days, I did not only do some last-minute shopping for next week (I will be bringing hemp fibres, proper long ones, to the Forum), but I've also been stocking up on things. As of this morning, the linen tape in 3 and 5 cm width is back in the shop again, and I have finally taken the plunge and will soon offer naturally-dyed silk yarn for embroidery. The skeins have arrived, and now there is some winding into portions to do, and then some taking of photographs. I have a very dark blue that almost passes for black, a dark blue, an orange, brown, white, red, yellow and green - enough to serve quite a few embroidery needs!

I won't be able to get it into the online shop before the Textile Forum, so it will take a little longer before it's available - but I'm working on it! When I'm not doing the Forum preparation stuff, that is... fortunately, I'm almost finished. One of the big things still left to do is packing all the things I have to take with me, and taking care of details such as charging the camera batteries. There's a growing list of things to pack that will help me no end when I do the actual packing on Friday or Saturday, though. All hail the power of lists!

It's time to shower you with links again! So here you go...

Are you looking for a movie to watch on Halloween? Here's a list of 10 horror movies featuring archaeologists.

If you prefer some real-life horror, how about this: the Swedish government wants to close all of the Swedish archaeological institutes in the Mediterranean. No joke. Archaeologik has done an article about this, in German; there is a petition running against the closure. If you want to sign (please do, and please spread the word), there is an explanation at the bottom of the English translation of the letter.

For those of you interested in the history of People of Colour, check out this tumblr "bookshelf" with free downloads - the books are concerning early modern and modern time.

In case you are looking for an excuse to visit Rome, there's a Protolang conference planned for September 2015, with the CfP open.

And finally, a very interesting video on how a seemingly small change in environment can have huge effects: Wolves in Yellowstone.

The OA week has provoked some more blogging, not only here. Doug has posted a longish article about OA publishing concepts that sound a lot more reasonable than the ones I ridiculed yesterday. And one before that, with a lot more information about free or affordably-priced OA journals, and links to said journals. Go read it here.

In other news, I'm still busy editing (the Beast is losing words - it's like a book diet!) and also preparing for the Textile Forum. Additionally, I am thinking about offering an embroidery set for doing a small medieval motif, about 4 cm in diameter. I would like to offer that as a complete package with cloth (that has the pre-inked design), naturally dyed silk thread, maybe gold thread, short instructions and possibly also a small (non-medieval, but affordable) embroidery frame. Suggestions as to motifs would be greatly appreciated!

The Textile Forum is drawing closer and closer, and thus we are busy preparing things and planning. I'm also doing editing work on the book project I am doing together with Gillian - we are reverting some changes that we made during one stage of the project, and both have the impression that our final book will be much better for it. It really is amazing how hard it can be to sort out the best sequence of chapters in a book - and how many bits and pieces would fit into several chapters equally well...

There's even more coming up - I have received hand-woven cloth ordered for the equipment of Lauresham, and it's washed and dried now, ready to be sent off for dyeing. The spinning-wheel tuning is also progressing, though slowly. The next step is a suitably "sticky" drive band to properly turn the whorls on flyer and spool; there is too much slip at the moment, and thus I am not getting the ratios that were planned.

Finally, I am starting to do the lists of things to prepare and to take to the "Kreativ" fair in Stuttgart. It's going to be a full and interesting November!

There's two things online that I recently heard about, downloadable for free.

One is the conference proceedings of Computers in Archaeology from the 2012 conference: Archaeology in the Digital Era: Papers from the 40th Annual Conference of Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA)
 and the second thing is Christina Petty's thesis about the warp-weighted loom, both in archaeology and in current practice, available here.

This weekend, I'll be at the last medieval fair thingie for this season - in Tannenberg. Should you be in the area, please drop by. As usual, I'll have my market stall somewhere on the meadow below the castle.

And accordingly, there will be no blogging from tomorrow (when it's a public holiday here anyways) until Tuesday. Maybe this dancing traffic light will make your waiting easier:

I've been pointed to a discussion about the journal "Internet Archaeology" by a friendly colleague. The journal IA has recently dropped its paywall and is now free access for everybody - to which I say Hooray and Thank you.

However, as someone in the discussion on Antiquist points out, it's not all free. The journal is financed by an "author pays" scheme, which means you need to be able to pay for having your paper published. The discussion quickly goes off into other terrains where there are problems in data access, but for me, the interesting bit is that one of the contributors says that "author pays" is not a problem, since nobody pays for that out of their own pocket anyways.

To which I say... not true. Definitely not true.

I would never publish in an author pays scheme, not only because I am a firm believer in the principle that the money flows towards the author, not away. I would also not be willing to shell out even more money for an experiment, thankyouverymuch. As a rule, I pay for my experiments myself, because getting funding for them? Difficult. Having an institution behind you makes things easier, but even then it's not guaranteed that you will get funding. Plus the time you have to spend on trying to secure said funding... never underestimate how much of your time, and energy, applications can suck out of your life.

I had plenty of experience with that topic when I tried to secure funding for my phd thesis (hint: I didn't get lucky). You have to do a new application package every time, then it takes ages to go through the system, and finally if you don't get funding, you have to deal with the emotional fallout. (At least I did.) At the end, I estimated about two to three weeks' work worth for each application. There's quite a lot of times that I've heard people complain that they are not getting around to really working, because in order to secure further funding so they will not lose their job, all they have time for is write one grant application after the other.

At some point, especially if the experiment is more work-time and not too much monetary investment for the things you need, you might decide it's not worth the effort to go for funding, and just go ahead and do it. Then, at the end, if all went well, you have an experiment and some results... and there you are. The thing should now be published. The last, very very last thing that I, personally, want to do in that case? Pay the journal.

So who is going to pay the people working at the journal? Actually, I would be fine with a paywall for journal articles - let the reader pay. With one caveat, though: make the prices reasonable. 30 or 50 USD for a 10-page article? You bet that nobody who can get around paying that will pay. However, if you charge 10 or 15 USD - that would be much more reasonable.
And for things that are older than, say, 2 years? If the journals would just charge one or two dollars, you can bet that I would not take the trouble to get the article via the library, or maybe ask a friend who has access. I'd pay, just for the convenience of having it at once. Because it's not a high price, and I'd be comfortable in paying that. Probably a lot of other folks would think exactly the same, and do exactly the same.

Oh, and in my ideal world? The author should get 10% of the income that the article generates. Fair pay for the work that went into it.