Martin Paul Eve bio photo

Martin Paul Eve

Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London

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The next few months mark a series of “10”s for me. On the 10th September, it will be 10 years since my Ph.D. viva. In November, it will be 10 years since I got my first lecturing position (TT Assistant Prof) at the University of Lincoln. It’s 10 years since I met Dr Caroline Edwards and we began publishing Alluvium together. And it’s 10 years since we began planning the Open Library of Humanities.

The times they are, as Dylan said, a-changing. I have some professional news. I am delighted to say that I will be joining Crossref as Principal R&D Developer at the end of this year. This is a great move for me, allowing me to continue my development work around metadata and scholarly communications while having space to do a deep dive into the infrastructural technologies that underpin contemporary academic publishing.

As is customary, I also wanted to use this opportunity to give a few notes on why I (an apparently successful and productive academic) am making this move. I should note that I am retaining my Professorship at Birkbeck, University of London; an institution that I am proud to represent and serve. For 200 years this College of the University of London has provided education to people to whom it was traditionally denied. This has never been more vital and remains core to my ethos. I will continue to supervise Ph.D. students in my areas. But I also want, at this point, to do something different and to get my hands dirty in research and development. I’ve realised, over the past few months, how much I enjoy technical development projects and that I would like to spend more of my time working on them.

I want to note that my health has played a role in this decision. I face ongoing challenges with long-term and serious disabling conditions; mostly around mobility. In particular, I am not in the physical state that I once was, around 2013, where I could travel the globe every week, promoting OLH, talking about open access, and teaching and researching on top of this. (Not least because my clinically extremely vulnerable status entirely rules out travel for the foreseeable future – thanks, Covid.) I now need a cane to walk any distance. But I think my mind seems still to be working quite well. The new role alleviates the pressure on me to be the public, in-person, face of major projects – and also to remove my line management responsibilities – even while I get to do exciting intellectual work around research and development at Crossref. I will most likely continue to speak in digital venues about the R&D I am conducting, trying to work as openly as possible. So, bad luck, you won’t quite get my face off your screens just yet.

This new role, then, will allow me to conduct research on scholarly communications metadata and technologies. I have many questions that I hope to be able to answer. How many of Crossref’s members actually have good digital preservation? What could Crossref do to facilitate better digital preservation? What new scholarly forms might need digital metadata storage/identifier persistence and who should provide that? I also want to build cool tools for others to use. Can we adopt the unofficial APIs and make them official? Could we extend programmatic deposit into these APIs? Can we make some corpus building tools for those who want a random sample of the scholarly literature? What can I do to make it easier for other people to ingest and use the Crossref metadata dumps? What do we do about quality control and versioning in an era of preprints? Are there better ways that we can signpost new versions of articles (revitalising CrossMark)? How do we think about equity across the Crossref member base? How do we enable smaller publishers to participate more fully in the Crossref ecosystem? What do we do about retractions and how do we signal this?

There are bigger questions at work here of which digital identifiers in scholarly communications are just one part. Indeed, digital identifiers are in many ways just a smaller subset of the seismic societal debates about identity that are reshaping our world (and that I explored in my book, Password). What is identity? A set of self-asserted positioning statements? Or a societally inter-validated series of propositions and positions? A distributed set of validated and time-bound assertions? How does identity change over time? If someone holds different stances at different times, are they “identical” with their previous self? (Should late-Wittgenstein have a different ORCID to his earlier “self”?) How does identity, in a scholarly communications context, relate to the views being expressed by the author? Are you “what you publish”? We certainly cite what people have said by using their names…

This move also comes with some more pragmatic questions: what does this mean for the things I do and the projects that I love and founded? Janeway and the Open Library of Humanities need to thrive without me. I don’t want to be Benevolent Dictator for Life of these projects and platforms with everybody seeing them as synonymous with me. I want them to develop external governance and oversight that goes beyond me. While I hover above them, it is difficult for that to be the case. I will, of course, be taking the time that I need to ensure that all is handed over in a responsible fashion. But de-centring oneself is sometimes the only way for these projects to have their own lives. Working with the OLH team – Caroline, Andy, Mauro, Rose, Paula, Simon, Katherine, Joe, and Lindsey, along with others along the way – has been an enormous privilege over the past decade.

My work on COPIM also requires some care. We’ve established (I think) a brilliant model for existing university presses to transition to OA for books. But, again, these need to be run by the presses and not always coordinated by me. It has been a privilege and pleasure working with Tom, Rupert, Joe, Janneke, Gary, Lucy, Toby, Judith, Graham, Simon, Javi, Vincent, Eileen, Francesca, Miranda, Gareth, Sharla, Caren, and Ross.

Another question: will I still be free to be opinionated and to express my views in different fora? Academic freedom in the UK is not quite so liberating as many believe, so it’s unclear how much this will change, but the basic answer is “yes”. My views are my personal views, not the views of Crossref. In my discussions with Crossref about the role, it has been explicitly stated that it is “part of my job” to challenge the status quo and to ask difficult questions where they arise. Having views on things, though, is not the same as serving members. In my actions at Crossref, I will work on the projects that best serve our members, irrespective of whether I have conflicting opinions.

Will I still write and publish? It’s very likely. Despite all the challenges and wrangling and difficulty that they can bring, writing and research soothe my soul. It’s really what gets me up in the morning! I need, on that note, to finish my work on my next book: Paper Thin. I then have a book planned on Star Trek: Voyager that I am keen to write. Finally, I think there might be a collaborative book in the works with colleagues at Crossref… on the philosophy of digital identifiers.

There’s a lot of chatter in the Twittersphere at present about people leaving academia. Quit lit. It is true that UK HE can seem a pretty tough place right now. It is hard to feel very cheery about its prospects when humanities departments, nation-wide, are under such threat and fewer people are being given the opportunity to receive a university education. I will miss working with my many brilliant colleagues in the English department at Birkbeck, although I will remain in close touch.

But it’s also easy to lose sight of what higher education and research might represent: a truly public good. I still believe in higher education and research as a force for immense benefit in the world and people’s lives. University changed me forever. University research saves and enlightens me (not least medically), on an ongoing basis. So it’s not a “goodbye” from me and academia but instead it’s my time to drill down into the infrastructures that underpin higher education research and its publication. This is where my future work for Crossref will fit in. This is my infrastructural turn.