I saw, going around on Twitter today, a 2012 article on the Open Access Irony Awards. This site is dedicated to the practice of humorously exposing articles/editorials that are pro-open access, but locked behind paywalls. As someone who has written in support of OA in closed venues, I wanted to quickly write to ask: what is so ironic about this practice?

The below is a piece that I wrote for The Conversation in the state before it was edited for publication there. While the version published there captures better the sense of the sting article and the general background, I wanted to post my unadulterated version here as it shows my true thoughts for those already immersed in the debate.

Quick post to add some Google juice to a problem. If you upgrade to Thunderbird 24 and it no longer underlines your misspelt text in red, go to Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Config Editor and set mail.compose.max_recycled_windows to 0. Fixing broken spellcheck in Thunderbird 24 was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on September 30, 2013.

It is already a cliché to announce the demise of the book in the wake of the digital revolution. While it might be unwise to stake our futures on the printed-and-bound codex, it seems doubtful that a shift in the way words are delivered will result in the downfall of long-form writing itself. What does seem questionable, however, is the persistence of the current publishing model in which publishers act as gatekeepers.

As a scholar in a literature department, I end up doing some very odd things. Among these is the development of various pieces of software for the typesetting and production of scholarly articles. I'm also going to be co-supervising some computer science MSc places. This digital inflection then leads me to wonder whether what I do should be termed "digital humanities". Does it matter?

I've already tweeted this a few times, but I'm pleased to announce that, in partnership with PKP (and subject to finding the right candidate) we have a funded place for an MSc in Computer Science at the University of Lincoln to work on open source software for scholarly XML typesetting. The University of Lincoln, in association with the Public Knowledge Project, is pleased to offer a funded place for the MSc by Research in Computer Science.

This piece explores the conceptions of terrorism in two novels that stand separated by the calamitous events of September 11th, 2001: Pynchon's Against the Day and Don DeLillo's Underworld , with special focus upon the genesis of these depictions in Cold War politics and notions of capitalist statehood.

Short answer: very good. This publication, in its sixth volume at the time of writing, is a scholar-led, open-access journal focusing on the "neo-Victorian" period, be that in literature or culture. As can be seen from the data below, I had a relatively quick publication experience with the journal. I had two reviews returned within a very reasonable period and publication followed not too long thereafter.

Although, in some ways, Sarah Waters’s Affinity looks akin to historiographic metafiction, M.-L. Kohlke has persuasively argued that the text is more accurately dubbed “new(meta)realism”, a mode that demonstrates the exhausted potential of the form.

Last week, I was contacted by Elizabeth Gibney, who writes for the Times Higher, with a request for comment on the recent Science-Metrix report, and particularly their findings that papers that were OA had higher citation rates, but gold was not as high as green. Elizabeth has very kindly included some of my response in her article, but I wanted to share my full response below.