In a bid to ensure that as many of my publications are as open as possible, I've begun trawling the back catalogue and am pleased to say, after a conversation with the editor of Pynchon Notes , that I am free to post an accepted version of the article. The publication, which covers the historical sources for the Peter Pinguid society in The Crying of Lot 49 was originally published in 2011.

Although, for now, this will be of limited interest/use to probably most readers of the journal, I today undertook the necessary work (by which I mean: cleaning up for compliance!) to expose the XML files that power the typesetting behind my journal of Pynchon studies, Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon. As you can see if you visit Issue 1, all the articles now have their XML available for download.

A quick heads-up to flag the following conference, taking place on the 17th May at the University of Sussex. Excellent exciting line-up! Modernist Intimacies: Panel Schedule.

It is a fundamental part of the PILA agreement that is signed when a publisher joins CrossRef that they will link to other articles using their DOIs. So, for example, if I cite an article in a journal that has a DOI, I must ensure that I use that DOI. If it doesn't have a DOI, then I needn't link to the article using the DOI.

This post is a transcript of a talk I gave at the University of Nottingham on the 25th March 2013 for the ECHIC "Beyond the Book" conference. As I've intimated in other talks that I've been giving recently, when speculating about the “future of X or Y”, I think it's important for us to countenance the potential reasons why things are as they stand at present.

Deviating from my current series of posts on ScholComms, I wanted to interject to recommend a new, independent music project from two of the original members of the Alabama 3. The project is entitled Mountain of Love (the founder, Piers Marsh's, pseudonym) and the genre is "dubtronica", a fusion of dub and electronica, as the name suggests.

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.

One of the problems with Open Access (both the movement and the practice), one that rings alarm bells in certain sectors, is the fact that the term "open" is inextricably linked to neoliberal paradigms.

The written evidence for the BIS Inquiry on Open Access has now been published and is available on the website for the UK parliament. The inquiry follows the past House of Lords inquiry and continues the bitter rivalries and feuds between advocates and detractors. I must say that there is still a great deal of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) in circulation.

A quick heads-up that I'll be speaking at the University of Sussex next week, my Ph.D. alma mater, on the "Future of Peer Review", alongside Maria Kowalczuk from BioMed Central. Taking place in the Sussex Research Hive on the 14th March 2013 at noon, we're hoping to explore the problems of the current model and the ways in which we can salvage what works while fixing the extant troubles.

March 2013 marks ten years since the start of the attack on Iraq. This controversial military action divided opinion in Britain and around the world, and its aftereffects have profoundly shaped politics and the media in Britain in the decade since. What was the conflict's cultural impact?