Yesterday evening I received a letter from my MP. I reproduce it below, with my response. This is the democracy that we do not want. My response: The Democracy We Do Not Want was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on August 28, 2013.

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?

This week I had the privilege of visiting Japan for the first time to speak with SPARC Japan (in Tokyo) about developments in open access for the humanities. A few interesting points on an OA-front came out of this that are worth sharing for those (much like myself) who primarily operate within an Anglo-American context; I learned a great deal. Firstly, many commentators in Tokyo voiced the argument-by-elitism in slightly different form.

My two spheres of interest -- difficult works of English literature and computer programming (OK, scholarly communications and publishing, also. OK, there are lots more spheres of interest) -- only intersect occasionally. However, in recent days I have been toying with the idea of using git to version control my writing.

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.

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.

I've just spent the past hour grappling with getting FOP to render the Unicode glyph for a checkmark (U+2713) in PDF output from XSL:FO. I thought I'd share a few things I learnt along the way (that make me feel a bit silly for not knowing them already). The type of errors I was getting were: Some observations after messing around for far too long: Fop does not support fallback to a secondary font on a character-by-character basis.

Another brief post on fop. I wanted to render some MathML markup inside an XSL:FO document to be converted to PDF using fop. The way to do this is to use JEuclid. However, the JEuclid page claims to only work on fop versions 0.95beta and 0.95. Turns out this is untrue.

Having returned from a glorious week away in Crotia and Bosnia (for Pynchon fans: it was "very nice, very nice, very nice indeed"), I have returned to an inbox that features the current state of play with HEFCE's thinking on open access mandates for a post-2014 REF. In order to ensure that I've got it straight in my own head, I thought I'd write a summary post for quick reference. I'm using the PDF version as my reference.

I'm very pleased to announce that I am joining Jisc's National Monographs Strategy Expert Advisory Panel.