April 2014

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Open Access, Monographs and "working for publishers for free"

The other day, I was sent a text message by a senior academic friend who has a healthily sceptical view of the open access work that I do. The question was: "re. Monographs, authors should be paid for their work, the publishing business model now allows for that as would online pay walls (not much…

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Managed to get my head around bash completion scripting in the last hour and this is now supported in meTypeset!

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Why yes, since you ask, I did just push to the meTypeset GitHub repo from 30,000 feet on a plane. #thefuture

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"there are only a few more sponsorship opportunities available" #yeahright #whoareyoukidding

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I've just been appointed to the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council's Peer Review College. Hurrah! #morework #butgood

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Right, cup of tea while the regression tests run but I /think/ I've just got meTypeset totally working on MS Windows. #headache

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Phew. Domestic emergency and @tado have been superb at getting me back up and running. Very stressful but they were very helpful.

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"should postgrads who teach side with students or staff?" < dispute is not students vs. staff. @GdnHigherEd

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Was very good to bump into @benshowers, to meet @Stephen_Curry today (at last!) and to catch up with @lawsonstu today, all at @Jisc!

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Today I am off to a Jisc Scholarly Communications Advisory Group meeting, where I represent @pkp.

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I do hope someone will organize a Pynchon conference in 2016 called "Against the Decade".

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Friends' kids are about to descend on our place for an Easter egg hunt. Will try not to compete /too/ hard against the 8 year olds.

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So, @AlbertRolls1 just posted a picture of his kid reading my book and I now fear for the youth of tomorrow.

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embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void.

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Part inspired by Foucault's work on prisons. And part inspired by this Pynchon line: prisoners in the top room of a circular tower,

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For those who have said kind words about the cover image of my book (don't judge etc.!), it was part inspired by philosophical cave stuff...

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Me, an owl and the book I wrote on Thomas Pynchon and Philosophy, which just arrived. Thanks @PalgraveLit!

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I will stop geeking in a minute, but, if that is how OOXML tables work, it's a complete pain. Bitmasks in XSLT look like a nightmare.

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OK, I am defeated. I have searched high and low through documentation and test cases and can't work out how OOXML encodes a table header.

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Bitmask values for w:tblLook w:val attribute in OOXML

For my own reference: 0x0020 Apply first row conditional formatting 0x0040 Apply last row conditional formatting 0x0080 Apply first column conditional formatting 0x0100 Apply last column conditional formatting 0x0200 Do not apply row banding conditional formatting 0x0400 Do not apply column banding…

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What do we mean by the "standing" and "reach" of research?

This article originally appeared, in a shorter, edited form in the Guardian: Is UK humanities research reaching the widest possible audience? Today marks the launch of another report into the open access ecosystem; a space that is rapidly becoming extremely saturated. Funded by HEFCE and overseen…

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Alluvium 2nd Birthday Panel Event

It's almost 2 years since I founded the open access journal Alluvium, which publishes short, topical articles written by leading academics on 21-century writing and 21st-century literary criticism. Launched in June 2012 with my colleague Dr Martin Eve, the journal has gone from strength to strength…

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Symposium on David Mitchell: 9th May, London

I'm very pleased to be able to say that I will be speaking at the symposium on David Mitchell, organised by Courtney Hopf and Wendy Knepper, on the 9th May at NYU London. Should anyone else wish to attend, you can register interest online. The programme is available to download in PDF form and…

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Sussex security staff wearing continuously recording lapel pins and suppressing protest on campus. Absolute disgrace.

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Book: Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno

Martin Paul Eve, Pynchon and Philosophy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Thomas Pynchon, perhaps the most important living American author, is famed for his lengthy, complex and erudite fictions. Given these characteristics, an examination of the philosophical dimensions of Pynchon's works…

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Gold refers to the work being open at source as opposed to green deposit. It has no presuppositions of business model. #lbf14 #facultylbf

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I just read that Elsevier Vice P Mark Seeley just said that "only gold [OA] is a business model" at #lbf14 -- Gold is /NOT/ a business model

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Suggestion to publishers: replace the disingenuous "invitation" to review with the word "request". It bugs me every time.

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At what point did the obsession with being able to "relate" to works of art come to such prominence?

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Made good progress on typesetter today by reworking the size classifier. Software now detects when it has made an error and mis-nested stuff

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Iwao Hakamada (now 78) spent almost 2/3 of his life waiting to be killed. CP supporters: what can you give him back to compensate for that?

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In the gentlest way: if you can't figure some of this stuff out, then running your own journal is not for you.

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I'll never respond rudely to such requests, but will state now that I will only help with specific questions.

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I still get emails, probably once a fortnight, that are just: "I want to start a journal, can you help?"

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A while ago I wrote on starting an open access journal, in which I set out the processes involved; even social editorial stuff.

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Michael Gove wants to end innumeracy in the UK? This is the man who said that "all schools should be above average".

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Designing an open source OA toolchain for books

The Cluster and the University Library invited Dr. Martin Eve (Lincoln University) for a two day intensive workshop with Dulip Withanage and Dr. Andrea Hacker to develop and design a publication tool for Open Access books. The workshop took place March 27-28. Building this publication tool is part…

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I have spent this morning debugging the most painful XSLT bug. Fixing is now going to entail merry hell on regression tests.

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Nothing I say today should be considered an April Fool's Day prank. And all Cretans are liars.

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Why OA mandates don't compromise academic freedom

Since yesterday's HEFCE announcement, I've seen some comments floating around that resurrect the argument that OA mandates are a blow to academic freedom. I do not agree, and especially so when we're talking about the HEFCE mandate. With HEFCE's current policy, 96% of submissions to the last REF…