Birkbeck, University of London

Martin Paul Eve

First of all, let me say that I found the piece of work I’m about to discuss really interesting in its own right. I know one of the co-authors and I’m an avid Soundcloud user (for electronic music, no-less!) so I thought this would be right up my street.

Researchers are altering their methods because of uncertainty over Creative Commons licenses

University of Lincoln

A map, as of the 22nd February 2015, of Chapter Two of the book I am slowly working on. Mimetic representation academy not only possible interaction Intertextuality can be seen as academy-like function of (self-)canonisation

 Tom McCarthy's
 
 C
 

University English haunts text 	Public persona of author as popular literary critic 	Synopsis of

 C

Inter-textuality key to novel and its marketing 		Thomas Pynchon

Chapter Two: Self-Canonisation, Literary-Historical Fictions and Aesthetic Critique

For an open-access advocate, it's easy to pick on Elsevier. An enormous and immensely profitable publisher, it has been, in my personal view, obstructive towards the implementation of open access. Again, in my opinion, this seems to be because it fears for its revenue stream, rather than because it cares about science. The ElsevierValentines hashtag was puerile, but fun, and demonstrated this sentiment. But these are just my opinions.

How can Elsevier claim that its OA revenue stream is separate from subscriptions in a hybrid environment?

This event will debate how and in what ways the web has complicated, enhanced, and changed the rights of citizens for better or for worse. The ongoing fallout from the Snowden revelations has both sharpened awareness of how our rights are changing and highlighted a culture of indifference towards once cherished rights and freedoms.

"A Web of Rights": Roundtable and Conversation at the British Library (Feb 19th, 2015) #bldigital

At the end of 2013 and 2014 I wrote blog posts on Occam’s Corner (over at the Guardian) to list and briefly review the books I read in each of those years. I am trying to develop this practice into a good habit because it spurs me to read; and I hope it might also serve to flag up titles of interest to others.

Stephen Curry (@Stephen_Curry) reviews Open Access and the Humanities

Come along tomorrow to celebrate the launch of two books on "openness" in higher education! From 2pm UK time tomorrow, this room will be open for a discussion with Martin Weller and me. This event promises to be really interesting and to showcase a range of thought on open access.  Martin's book, The Battle for Open was just published by Ubiquity Press while my own Open Access and the Humanities just came out with Cambridge University Press.

Online p̶a̶r̶t̶y̶ webinar to talk open access with @mweller and me: Tuesday 16th December 3pm

Same great sleeve, less waste. Because we care about our planet, this 85% post-consumer-fiber cup sleeve uses 34% less paper than our original. Intended for single use only. US #6863644. But because we care about competing with others and about your perception of how much our brand cares about the planet more than we

 actually

care about the planet, we patented our 85% post-consumer-fiber cup sleeve.

"Because we care about our planet..."

At a recent talk I gave, I was asked whether open access in the humanities is a "solution without a problem". Without wanting to disparage my questioner, I consider this to be a question born of institutional privilege and of conservatism. Firstly, I consider it a perspectivized take on the situation; just because one cannot see a problem does not mean that it doesn't exist, merely that it is invisible to that particular questioner.

Is open access a "solution without a problem" for the humanities?

OK, so this was utterly painful and I needed to share what finally worked for me. I have 2 x Nvidia GTX480 cards. I have 3 x monitors. I wanted to be able to run all three off the same box, using it as a single X Screen (i.e. so I can move windows between screens and it acts correctly). No matter what I tried, it wouldn't let me do so with the proprietary driver. I asked on Stack Exchange and got somewhere closer.

Enabling a triple-head (3 monitor) setup on Linux Mint 16 ("Petra") with two Nvidia cards

As you may, or may not, know, I am working on an open source tool for scholarly article typesetting. Whether you care about this or not (it's quite geeky in some ways, but I think important), if you speak a language other than English, then I need your help. One of the things this software has to do is to try to work out where in a document we might find a list of works cited by either a scientist or a scholar.

Scholars and scientists who work in languages other than English: please help

Modularizing the Project

Today brings with it some notable changes to my scholarly article XML (NLM/JATS) typesetter (meTypeset). First off, the project is now nicely handling user supplied captions to figures, so long as they are in the format “Figure 1: a figure caption”. The second, more important change, that I've implemented, however, is to begin to modularize the project and to add individual command line hooks for

Modularizing the meTypeset typesetter for the user interface phase

Eve, Martin Paul. 2014. ‘“some Kind of Thing It Aint Us but yet Its in Us”’. SAGE Open 4 (1). doi:10.1177/2158244014521636. http://sgo.sagepub.com/content/4/1/2158244014521636. You can either download the article directly from SAGE, download a copy from this site, or grab the version from the University of Lincoln repository. All the versions should be the same as this is a Gold open access article.

Publication: David Mitchell, Russell Hoban, and Metafiction After the Millennium

As is now fairly common knowledge, HEFCE expects green deposit on all journal articles to be included in REF2020.

 EDIT:

just to clarify: HEFCE has not finalised its position. This is my expected outcome. The deposit must be made upon

 article acceptance

and not later. In the case of embargoes, this should be set in the software.

HEFCE (REF2020), IR deposit and embargoes

Lawrence Lessig, "Introduction to Free Software, Free Society: The Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman". Available online at https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/lessig-fsfs-intro.html. Licensed under a CC-BY-ND license.      "Every generation has its philosopher" was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on January 19, 2014.

"Every generation has its philosopher"

So, in conjunction with the amazing people at South End Press -- a group of people unsurpassed in my esteem -- I'm proud to be part of a proposal for the SXSW conference this year. However, we need you to VOTE FOR OUR PANEL at PanelPicker. Please do this. It takes 2 minutes. What are we planning to talk about? How has digital publishing affected small independent presses? Are small independent presses suffering and why?

SXSW Panel: Vote to get Open Access on the agenda

Last week saw the descent of some sixty Pynchon scholars upon the small northern city of Durham in the UK. The occasion was the International Pynchon Week conference, this year a co-sponsored event between the University of Durham and the University of Lincoln. The event was organised primarily by Samuel Thomas, of Durham, while I had assisted with various aspects of promotion, web design and suchlike.

On International Pynchon Week

While I agree with much of what they say, in a post on the LSE Impact Blog, Meera Sabaratnam and Paul Kirby write, of the latest round of HEFCE consultations on OA for a post-2014 REF:  This isn't how I read the proposed document at all.

Has "the licensing battle been deferred" in the latest HEFCE document?

I'm extremely pleased to announce that I will be speaking at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition on "The Front Line of OA in Humanities and Social Sciences" on the 23rd August, 2013 at the Tokyo National Institute of Informatics. I'll post more about the remit of the talk when I can, but the seminar schedule is now online. The talk will be translated, so all are welcome.

Speaking at SPARC Japan

I'm pleased to announce the publication of the open access booklet, Collins, Ellen and Milloy, Caren and Stone, Graham, Guide to Creative Commons for humanities and social science monograph authors, Baker, James and Eve, Martin Paul and Priego, Ernesto (eds.), OAPEN-UK and Jisc Collections: 2013. As you can see from that list, I was privileged enough to be invited to edit this important guide.

Publication: 'Guide to Creative Commons for humanities and social science monograph authors'

If you are experiencing crashes when you update your mpd library on Ubuntu 12.10, the fault is with libmad0. This can be fixed by installing libmad0 from Debian Wheeze. As root:  I can confirm that this has fixed my update crashes. When I get to the box itself I'll confirm whether audio playback still works!

Fixing mpd segfault on Ubuntu 12.10 on ARM devices (Mele, Pandaboard etc)

Now in its third year, we invite you to submit, on Twitter via the #Pynchon2013 hashtag, the Facebook Event page or even just by emailing me, your photographs for Pynchon in Public Day 2013! The event was founded to mark the birth date of one of the most important living American writers, Thomas Pynchon.

Pynchon in Public Day 2013

Yesterday, Thursday the 14th of March 2013, I had the great pleasure of speaking at the University of Sussex to an entirely mixed audience of humanists, scientists, librarians, OA enthusiasts and OA sceptics on the topic of the Future of Peer Review.

The Future of Peer Review

Martin Paul Eve, ‘Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and the Problems of “Metamodernism”: Post-Millennial Post-Postmodernism?’, C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings, 1 (2012), pp. 7-25.  Available online at C21 Literature. You can download 50% of the article for free, as per the licensing conditions of Gylphi.

Publication: 'Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and the Problems of 'Metamodernism': Post-millennial Post-postmodernism?'

Co-presented with Dr. Caroline Edwards: "Floats Like a Butterfly, Stings Like a Finch: Adorno, Utopia and Open Access Publishing",

 Lincoln University

, 21st-Century Research Group, Weds 27th Feb 4.15-5.30, MC0024 This paper addresses the specific threats faced by the recent Finch Report and will be a practical introduction to the future problems that will occur from the way in which Open Access is being implemented.

Conference Paper: "Floats Like a Butterfly, Stings Like a Finch: Adorno, Utopia and Open Access Publishing" (Lincoln University)

University of Sussex

Ron Charles has tweeted that a new Pynchon novel will be published by Penguin in Fall 2013. Entitled

 Bleeding Edge

the work will not quite be out in time for International Pynchon Week 2013, but... wow. Charles stated that two Penguin employees had confirmed the news to him and there's already a piece up about it at The Huffington Post. Let the PYNCHON-L speculation begin!

New Pynchon Novel! Fall 2013: "Bleeding Edge"

It is with great pleasure that I am able to announce that Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon has entered into a partnership with Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. LMU have generously provided the funding that we need to cover our technical costs for the entire coming year. In turn, Orbit is offering editorial experience to several postgraduate students at a crucial time of transition to the Open Access model.

Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon receives funding from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

It is my pleasure to announce, with both great excitement and the inevitable slight sadness, that as of January 2013, I will be leaving the University of Sussex (the inevitable slight sadness) to take a permanent position as a Lecturer in Literature at the University of Lincoln (the great excitement!)  I have had several excellent years at Sussex, where I started my Ph.D. in 2009, and have been treated extremely well throughout;

Moving on from Sussex and joining the University of Lincoln

This post is written in response to a question by the ace Bernie Folan, from Sage publishers, who asked whether ORCID has the potential to disrupt, or conversely endorse, the problems in publication driven by accreditation structures. Here's a few of my hastily assembled, initial thoughts...  First off, for those who don't know, ORCID is an identifier system for scientists and scholars.

On ORCID, accreditation structures and altmetrics

A trip down the Yodel depot this morning yielded my copy of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die in which I have a review of Marukami's flawed masterpiece,

 1Q84

. The book itself is a lovely object and I'd encourage everybody to have a copy, even if, obviously, the project is doomed to exclude many deserving works.

Publication: Review of 1Q84 in 1001 Books to Read Before You Die (London: Cassell Illustrated, 2012)

Frequent readers may recall that I had implemented CLOCKSS support in OJS. I'm sad to say that the original commit was flawed and it was decided that the best thing to do was to revert it, the reason being that there was no selective option to turn off the CLOCKSS manifest. Anyway, after extensive work, I've re-done the patch so that OJS has fully customizable CLOCKSS support that can be enabled and disabled independently from LOCKSS.

More on OJS and CLOCKSS

It seems that 2012 really was the “tipping point” for Open Access, especially in the UK. The Finch Report has mandated OA for RCUK-funded projects and the implementation phase is now hastily underway. No longer can Open Access be seen as a minority issue; it's here and it's here to stay. As one struggle ends, another begins though, like a grim phoenix rising from the ashes.

The Grim Phoenix: The New Challenges for Open Access

A quick note to say that David Letzler has very kindly submitted a review of American Postmodernist Fiction and the Past, by Theophilus Savvas that is now live in Orbit 1.2.      New Orbit review: American Postmodernist Fiction and the Past, by Theophilus Savvas was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on October 21, 2012.

New Orbit review: American Postmodernist Fiction and the Past, by Theophilus Savvas

I'm quoted with a few choice words this week in the

 Times Higher Education

for their piece on the already infamous statement by a coalition of editors of history journals, who equate CC-BY with plagiarism. Here's the quotation: Here's the full text from which that was excerpted: There's a further few thoughts that have struck me since then. Plagiarism is

 not

a legal term that has any bearing upon licensing;

On /That/ Statement by History Journal Editors

As is now common knowledge, the Finch report has recommended the Gold Open Access route and the government policy implementation has followed the advice that all publications from RCUK must be published in Open Access destinations (or in Institutional Repositories after a short embargo period).

 This includes the AHRC

. It's important to ask, then: where are the OA venues for the humanities disciplines?

What will the Humanities do Post-Finch? (or: where are the OA venues?)

Organized by Dr. Caroline Edwards and Tony Venezia, the Weird Council conference takes place from the 14th-15th September. Register now!  Or you can download the poster as a PDF.      Conference on China Miéville: Weird Council was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on September 03, 2012.

Conference on China Miéville: Weird Council

In the wake of the Finch report, one of the most frequent cries from academics, particularly at the early career phase, was one of despair. The endorsement of Gold OA meant, mostly to them, that they would have to budget for publication funds in their applications. In short, Gold meant gold; currency. This is, of course, not what the terminology means in the traditional Budapest initiative model.

Open Access needs terminology to distinguish between funding models: Platinum OA/Gold NON-APC

Yet again a certain group of people are being screwed over... guess who? That's right! The people who paid tuition fees to go to university and are now trying to get their first academic post. UCL just advertised for 3 unpaid full-time "internships" that required specialist scientific knowledge and, in essence, amounts to offloading the work that's tedious onto young researchers.

More unpaid academic positions and apparent "culture of entitlement"

I've had several conversations in the past few weeks on the different modes of dissemination and the REF's undervaluation of the book collection. The argument goes that essays in a book collection are less valued because they're not peer reviewed. Except... they are. They're just not shipped out by an editor of a journal to multiple experts to formulate consensus. In some ways, the edited collection is reviewed to a greater extent.

The undervalued book collection and peer review

After the excellent, "What Happens Now" 21st-century fiction conference, I thought it would be worthwhile sharing the Prezi that I created, in case it's of any interest: .prezi-player { width: 750px; } .prezi-player-links { text-align: center;

Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and 21st-Century Utopianism (presentation)

Following on from part 1, part 2 and part 3, this is the third in a series of posts designed to get a new journal off the ground.

 Copyediting and Proofreading

When I started out work on Excursions journal almost three years ago, I didn't know the difference between copyediting and proofreading. In short: copy editing is the process of bringing a piece in line with house style.

Starting an Open Access Journal: a step-by-step guide part 4

Prefatory note (2016)

Please note that I receive several email requests per week from individuals asking for help or detailed guidance in how to setup an OA journal. With my deepest regrets, I am afraid my time is simply insufficient to provide such guidance beyond what is here on these pages.

 Introduction

Scholarly publishing is totally broken.

Starting an Open Access Journal: a step-by-step guide part 1

Abstract

Academic publishing is in an unstable period of transition. There is a growing degree of anger, especially from early-career academics in a time of austerity, at perceived publisher extortion. The current models of open access do not address all these problems, especially with regard to library budgets.

Publication: 'Tear it down, build it up: the Research Output Team, or the library-as-publisher', Insights, 25, 2 (July 2012), pp. 158-162

It's taken quite a while and a lot of energy on my part, but my journal of scholarship on Thomas Pynchon, Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon, is now live and launched.    I've learnt many things about academic publishing, most notably the full mechanisms by which CrossRef works. Indeed, here's a very fine DOI link to our preface!      Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon is live was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on July 09, 2012.

Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon is live

Up at Durham, Sam Thomas has just announced the details of the forthcoming International Pynchon Week 2013 Conference to be held at Durham University from 5th-8th August, 2013.

International Pynchon Week 2013 Conference: Website and CFP

I'm always on the lookout for good, free image sharing sites and somebody pointed out MorgueFile to me the other day. It's not CC licensed. In fact, in many cases it's even more permissive.  Hope that helps somebody.        Another great source for free images to use in blogging was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on June 24, 2012.

Another great source for free images to use in blogging

The third conference I attended last week was a day called SuShI. The idea was to bring together the humanities and business worlds. It was, from my extremely critical Leftist perspective, a somewhat strange event. I attended talks on advertising and creativity schematising business theorists. I have to say that, although left still not entirely persuaded by the contents of their papers, it was an extraordinary fusion.

Sussex-Southampton Initiative: SuShI. An interdisciplinary fusion.

Imagine if you could have, in your pocket, access to the world's research information in an easy-to-navigate, accessible format with dynamic add-ons, customizable aspects and links to other pieces of research. Well, we have a way of doing this. The technologies are called XHTML, HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. The problem is, if academic materials are published in those formats, it is harder for publishers to: Lock down material with DRM.

Beware the next wave of academic publishing grimness: apps.

The second day of the 21st-Century British Fiction Conference at Birkbeck saw an opening keynote from Bob Eaglestone in which he provocatively challenged the unformed nature of the field.

The Ontological Problems of Contemporary Fiction Studies are Actually its Ontological Prerequsites

2nd Jul 2012 Checkland, Falmer Campus, University of Brighton, UK  A one-day symposium hosted by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) and the Faculty of Arts, University of Brighton  Cost: FREE (Space Strictly Limited)  Deadline for proposals: 15th May 2012  Visit the webpage: http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/research/research-conferences/teaching-post-millennial-literature    Keynotes: Dr David James (University of Nottingham) and Prof Peter Boxall

Teaching Post-Millennial Literature: A HEA and University of Brighton Symposium

This is just a quick post about my experience of submitting a Ph.D. having worked full-time on it previously since October 2009. It's odd. During the Ph.D. I wrote several articles for journals and book chapters concurrently (ie. that were nothing to do with my Ph.D. work). Now I'm awaiting a viva it suddenly feels a great deal harder to undertake exactly the same exercise, even though I have a great deal more time.

Post-Submission Weirdness

In which I look nervous and shifty.    Please note: this post's featured image is licensed and not shared under a CC license.      The future of academic publishing Q&amp;A was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on April 09, 2012.

The future of academic publishing Q&amp;A

So, it looks, with the easy reach of software such as Open Journal Systems and Annotum, as though anybody can create a journal. This is, to a large extent, true. It comes, however, with a problem. Even assuming that you get the editorial board together, have a great first issue and the journal continues, what happens (to take an extreme case) if the server admin dies (I mean real, physical human death)? What happens to the content?

The problems for small Open Access journals in terms of digital preservation

I have been asked, by an EdTech researcher called Jen Rhee, to share this graphic, which comes courtesy of Open-Site under a CC-BY-ND license, in order to solicit further comments. Aside from the pedantic tic that I had when reading "amount of books", the graphic is pretty interesting.

Wikipedia Stats Visualized

I am pleased to announce that I will be speaking at the “Transforming Objects” conference at Northumbria University in May this year. Thomas Pynchon has been critically considered, for almost the whole of his writing career, to hold an idealist stance, both epistemologically and ontologically. Objects, in the strange counter-universe of his novels, are held to be projections, unrealities of deluded questing subjects.

Conference Paper: Thomas Pynchon, Materialism and Negative Dialectics, 28-29 May, 2012, Northumbria University

Ok, so it could really be Wordpress for anybody, but here's the Prezi that I made for a true step-by-step, from the very beginning guide to setting up a new Wordpress-based website. We also covered the beginnings of the information you'd need to customize the site and the benefits of self-hosting. The Prezi is probably only really of use for those who want a basic guide to setting up a new wordpress.com blog. .prezi-player { width: 550px;

Wordpress for Academics

Sparked off by a comment on Document Object Identifiers and metrics by Ernesto Priego, I wrote up a brief proposal for the tech side of what I perceived as the function of DOIs.

DOIs: What you need to know

I will be running, on the 31st January, a workshop for Sussex researchers on protecting their assets; aka. backing up their work. After the first year of my Ph.D I had a nasty scare when my laptop was stolen on my journey home (I had a migraine, effectively passed out and didn't notice someone simply take my bag from beneath me on the train). This could have been dire. Fortunately, though, I take backup and encryption very seriously.

Protecting Your Assets: Backing up your Academic Work

"This defines the untruth of any genius aesthetics that suppresses the element of finite making, the τέχνη in artworks, in favor of their absolute originality" (Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 2004.

Adorno terminology: τέχνη

"Artworks are eliminated along with the youthful θαυμαζειv" (Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 2004. p. 109.)  θαυμαζειv = wonder, marvel (LSJ)  With thanks to Georgios Maragos for confirmation.

Adnorno terminology: θαυμαζειv

While we wait for news on the Hollywood adaptation, it seems that Jeff Hoyt has taken matters into his own hands and put together an adaptation of the first scene of Thomas Pynchon's

 Inherent Vice

starring Orien Longo and Rachel Kadison. I'm sceptical about Pynchon ever making good movie material, but judge for yourselves.

It's not P.T. Anderson, but someone has started an Inherent Vice adaptation

With thanks to Roland Clare, a quick snippet of interest (certainly to me, anyway) on the etymology of a certain Étienne Cherdlu, a character featuring, despite omission from Hurley's

 Pynchon Character Names: A Dictionary

(Hurley, Patrick. Pynchon Character Names: A Dictionary. Jefferson N.C.: McFarland &amp; Co. Publishers, 2008.), in "The Secret Integration". (Pynchon, Thomas.

Pynchon Character Etymology: Étienne Cherdlu

This short piece provides the cumulative textual evidence that Pynchon consulted a single source, Golder, F.A., 1915. "The Russian Fleet and the Civil War". The American Historical Review, 20(4), pp.801-812, to construct the historicity of the Peter Pinguid Society episode in

 The Crying of Lot 49

, as opposed to consulting the original Arkhiv Morskogo Ministerstva, Dielo Kantseliarii Morskogo Ministerstva, no. 91, pt. III., pp. 102, 103.

Publication: 'Historical Sources for Pynchon’s Peter Pinguid Society', Pynchon Notes, 56-57 (Spring-Fall 2009 (2011)), pp. 242-245

Update

: Due to my university teaching timetable changing, unfortunately the Wordpress workshops have been postponed. I'll update this post as and when new times are available. A quick promotional post for two upcoming workshops that I am running at the University of Sussex. Book fast, places going already! All workshops can be booked online and are free of charge to Sussex students.

Forthcoming workshops: academic websites &amp; protecting your assets!

A quick post to point out that I've written a concise synopsis of Google Scholar over at the Sussex Doctoral School blog. Enjoy!

 Featured image by alles-schlumpf under a CC-BY-NC-SA license.

Guest post on Google Scholar Citations was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on November 18, 2011.

Guest post on Google Scholar Citations

...slightly misleading title; obviously, that doesn't work. I have an OCZ RevoDrive SSD which, although very fast, has some serious problems with my BIOS. The consequence is that GRUB cannot see the device (well, it can, but only after a 15 minute de-power cycle), but Linux can. This causes some headaches. The way I worked around this was to put /boot on a separate partition and have the root filesystem on the SSD.

Booting Ubuntu from devices invisible to GRUB2

About half an hour before the official announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2011 (which was awarded to Tomas Tranströmer) reports started circulating on Twitter that the winner was, controversially, the Serbian author, Dobrica Cosic. The source was http://www.nobelprizeliterature.org, which looked like this:    Smelling a rat, as the official site is nobelprize.org, I decided to check it out.

The Nobel Prize for Literature 2011 Hoax

Today is international Open Access Week and, in celebration and to raise awareness, I gave a talk and workshop at the University of Sussex for a cross-discipline audience. I was pleasantly surprised this year at the acceptance of an open culture and intrinsic understanding of the benefits of openness, both in monetary and permissive terms.

Open Access Week at the University of Sussex

Today is the day that we've all been dreading waiting for. The final unveiling of the UK Higher Education White Paper. It's expected later today, but here's some early reactions. The Guardian runs with "'Naming and shaming' for degrees with poor jobs record", which gets to the core of the matter:  The BBC are going with "Universities shake-up eyes greater competition", focusing on a fight for proportion of places.

UK HE White Paper day

I've just been playing around with my webcam, which I haven't hooked up in ages, and was unable to get it working under my 64bit Fedora installation. Having done a bit of reading, and having found that some applications can use the camera, I worked out the solution.

64bit GNU/Linux and Webcams (Logitech Quickcam Express)

I am due up for vaccination in the very near future. This is good news. But it’s tempered.

How much optimism?

On the same day as I submitted my next book manuscript, I am pleased to be able to say that Reading Peer Review, my 7

 th

academic book, has been published by Cambridge University Press. The book is open access and available at CUP or in BIROn. Here’s the blurb: How do you change the world of academia and what insight can peer review provide into this question?

Reading Peer Review is published today!

My Ph.D. supervisors were not particularly hands on. This was not slacking on their part – it suited me just fine and they could see that I had the thesis project in hand. There was a lesson from one of my supervisors that I will never forget, though. I was writing my first conference paper proposal/abstract. I felt it wasn’t quite right and asked for his advice.

An anecdote on editing

Met up with my usually Stateside fellow Pynchonite Jesse Sherwood last week when he visited London. While sampling the delights of the city was important, he also took time out to get himself branded with a Lot 49 muted posthorn. While tattoos aren't, personally, my thing, I think it's great! Just remember, though: Don't Ever Antagonize the Horn.

A Thomas Pynchon tattoo recruit

Some choice excerpts and comments on Raym Crow. (2009). Income Models for Open Access: An Overview of Current Practice. SPARC. https://sparcopen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/incomemodels_v1.pdf. I am thinking about this in relation to the list of business models for OA books that we are building, even though it was written for journals over a decade ago.

Notes on Raym Crow. (2009). Income Models for Open Access: An Overview of Current Practice. SPARC.

Subscribe to Open is a model pioneered by Annual Reviews that basically says that if libraries continue to subscribe, the title will become OA. If libraries drop out, it goes back to being subscription. A good point that Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe brought to my attention is that this poses problems for the status of the title under Plan S provisions. Is this a type of hybrid publication?

Subscribe to Open and Plan S

This week, our COPIM WP2/WP3 reading group discussed Meunier, Benjamin, and Olaf Eigenbrodt, ‘More Than Bricks and Mortar: Building a Community of Users Through Library Design’,

 Journal of Library Administration

, 54.3 (2014), 217–32 &lt;https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2014.915166&gt;. We were interested to consider the implications of participatory design in library architecture for new digital infrastructures.

On participatory design in library architecture

After the success of the piece that I co-wrote with Jennifer M. Jones for The Guardian last week, I have had several requests to read the original version from which the final published version was excerpted. When the press writes disparagingly of dangerous university radicalisation, it should be remembered that radicalism sits among the core functions of the University.

Angry Young Academics: The "Directors' Cut"

I have a series of book projects in train at the moment and wanted to write a little bit of this down so that I have a record of where I was in the projects at this stage: Eve, Martin Paul, and Jonathan Gray, eds.,

 Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020) is currently in the final stages of production.

Academic books I'm writing

The

 Excursions

editorial board are pleased to announce the launch of

 Excursions

, Volume 2, Issue 1: Virus (2011). Issue: Virus See also: Archive / CFP

 Featured image copyright Luke Jerram, 2011. Used with permission.

Excursions, Vol. 2, Issue 1: Virus (2011) was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on June 21, 2011.

Excursions, Vol. 2, Issue 1: Virus (2011)

A the time that I started writing this blog post, I was intending to extol the virtues of the newly released Fedora 15 compared to the trainwreck that is Ubuntu 11.04. It turns out the story isn't as clear cut as that, but wanted to give my experience in comparison installing across two machines. This all started when I upgraded my laptop (a Toshiba Satellite 650C) to Ubuntu 11.04 during the beta period earlier this year.

Moving from Ubuntu to Fedora

When I was in hospital the week before last, I was struck by how all-pervasive the rhetoric of "fighting" is when people are coping with illness or new disability. I'm sure that this has been covered by those in critical disability studies far better than I can put it here, but I wanted to flag it up as an area of concern. I certainly know that, for pretty much my entire life, this has been the terminology deployed.

The Rhetoric of "Fighting" Illness and Disability

In a fascinating LA Times piece published today, it is remarked, in conversation with a close friend of Thomas Pynchon that: So why don't we? Why don't those of us for whom Pynchon is a professional, and personal, interest do this? The answer, to me, seems self explanatory, but before answering, it's worth giving a brief history of Pynchon's stance on privacy.

 Featured image: Pynchon's hand giving a V-Sign around the door. From the LA Times.

On Pynchon and Privacy

Attached are my lecture notes for the "Genre 2" lecture I gave at the University of Sussex (2011-05-04): Martin Paul Eve - "We've met before, haven't we?": Spatio-Temporal Distortion in David Lynch's Lost Highway. This file is released under a Creative Commons, Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike license. It remains Copyright 2011 Martin Paul Eve. Featured image Copyright 1997 October Films.

"We've met before, haven't we?": Spatio-Temporal Distortion in David Lynch's Lost Highway

If, like myself, you had travelled to The Barbican last night, you would have seen two men, a father and son, on a dazzlingly white, clinical set, a gigantic face of Jesus projected onto the screen behind them. The face shimmers. It's impossible to look at, every time it draws your focus, the area under scrutiny seems to disappear, only for a new area to command attention.

Romeo Castellucci / Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio's "On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God"

Last night I had the pleasure of attending an event at Foyles bookstore in London featuring David Foster Wallace's Literary Agent Bonnie Nadell and Editor Michael Pietsch. The evening was in honour of the UK launch of Wallace's posthumous publication,

 The Pale King

which is current receiving rather favourable reviews.

David Foster Wallace's The Pale King: Bonnie Nadell and Michael Pietsch at Foyles

Giving conference papers is a crucial part of academic life. It's the prime means of engaging with others in your discipline, getting a face associated with your name and, to use a vile term, networking. However, before you've made it big-time and are being invited to such events, you'll have to respond to calls for papers, or CFPs as they are abbreviated, and this is a bit of an art form.

How not to apply to give a conference paper

As I tweeted yesterday, @dhlbrown was attending a workshop on which I participated last year at the University of Sussex on getting published in Academia. He very kindly tweeted his notes and I recommend you go follow him but thought it was worth collating the information in one place, which also gave me an opportunity to dig out my notes from last year's session.

Getting Published in Academia

I've been engaged recently in a discussion on Twitter as to the appropriateness of Creative Commons licensing for Open Access journals wishing to remove permission barriers, ie. become "libre". It seems there is a real problem as to how to define academic work. My original instinct was to go with a CC-BY-NC license as this would allow redistribution, use etc. in a context that was non-commercial.

Is academic work commercial? How does this affect libre licensing?

This is a quick post to give an update on the report from the first meeting of the UK Pynchon Network. I have had several requests for reports on the day and also for recordings. This will all be forthcoming. The delay is due to the fact that Vimeo (YouTube has a restriction of 15 minutes length on most accounts) will not permit free account holders to upload more than 500mb worth of video per week.

Delay to Report on First UKPN Meeting

A quick post to highlight the wonderful Postcards Exhibition taking place this Friday at the University of Sussex!

Picture This: Postcards Exhibition

Bit of an in-joke, but I think my career has reached a new high with Gaz's recent award bestowed upon me:        The Gaz Pearce Award was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on March 11, 2011.

The Gaz Pearce Award

This is my second review of a book on WikiLeaks, a subject which holds almost indefinite fascination for me, the first being David Leigh and Luke Harding's

 WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

. The book I am covering today is Greg Mitchell's self published

 The Age of WikiLeaks: From Collateral Murder to Cablegate (and Beyond)

. Before proceeding, however, it's worth checking out this video: &lt;/embed&gt; This video

The Analytic of Patriotism: On Greg Mitchell's The Age of WikiLeaks

For all the pains they take throughout to emphasise the vast quantity of editorial resources deployed in the redaction and publication of the most sensational scoops of 2010, the impression one gets reading David Leigh and Luke Harding's

 WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

is that some of those editors should have been deployed upon the book itself. It has, obviously from the timescale, been put together in a rush.

David Leigh and Luke Harding's WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

Dear Sir/Madam,  I write in a personal capacity to request an internal review of my partially denied FOI request with the reference FOI2015/25797 (pertaining to meetings between senior BIS officials and Elsevier/Thomson Reuters).  Details in the request were denied on the basis of a Section 43 public interest test.

Internal review of FOI2015/25797

While browsing the EThOS Thesis collection today, I suddenly became curious as to the history, statistically speaking, of doctorates in my field of literature: studies on Thomas Pynchon. It emerges that, on record since 1978, there have been 23 doctorates awarded in the UK on, or in part concerning, the fiction of Thomas Pynchon.

A Statistical History of UK Pynchon Doctorates

Image credit: grewlike under a CC-BY-NC-SA license.

 Picture this: postcards and letters beyond text Postcards Competition – deadline extended!

The arrival date for entries is now the 4 February. There is no entry fee and the competition is open to all. For full details of how to enter, see our website.

Picture this: Postcards Competition

As mentioned previously, the two part tutorial on c99.org is a great starting place for people wanting to write their own synchronization service for Android. The only problem is that, because it syncs to Contacts, it omits to tell you what to do to get your new service appearing under Settings -&gt; Accounts -&gt; "Data and Synchronization".  The answer is surprisingly simple, but also elusive.

Getting a custom Sync Service and Adapter to show up under "Data and Synchronization" on Android

My review of Alan Liu's latest offering,

 Local Transcendence: Postmodern Historiography and the Database

is now available to read in Textual Practice vol. 24 issue 6. I'm in the process of clearing up pre-print Open Access permissions and hope to post that when clarified.

Publication: ‘Local Transcendence: Postmodern Historiography and the Database by Alan Liu’, Textual Practice, 24, 6 (December 2010)

Just a quick promotional post to get the word out about the research hive seminars at Sussex. This series presents an exciting opportunity to hear about, and fore-arm yourself against, the challenges posed to 21st-century research. There are sessions on research communication, public engagement, copyright, careers and the REF. If you are interested in attending, official information is available on the library website.

Integration testing locally and on GitLab CI using LocalStack