It is with great pleasure that I am able to announce that Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon has entered into a partnership with Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. LMU have generously provided the funding that we need to cover our technical costs for the entire coming year. In turn, Orbit is offering editorial experience to several postgraduate students at a crucial time of transition to the Open Access model.

I'm quoted with a few choice words this week in the Times Higher Education for their piece on the already infamous statement by a coalition of editors of history journals, who equate CC-BY with plagiarism. Here's the quotation: Here's the full text from which that was excerpted: There's a further few thoughts that have struck me since then. Plagiarism is not a legal term that has any bearing upon licensing;

Several exciting goings-on at Alluvium merit a quick post here to give a rundown of the new features available, which are mostly behind-the-scenes, but definitely do a lot for Alluvium as a publishing destination. Firstly, I've been working with Caroline to ensure that our image use is totally compliant with UK and international copyright law.

My review of Theophilius Savvas' American Postmodern Fiction and the Past is now out in Literature and History , 21, 2 (Autumn 2012), pp. 106-108. As the DOI link seems to be broken for now, it's also available via ingentaconnect. Update: following email confirmation from Ryan Sweet at Literature & History, I can confirm that I am allowed to post the full text pre-print.

If you own an HP Photosmart C6300 series and upgraded to Ubuntu 12.10, you may have noticed that you are unable to set the scan resolution (DPI) in any of your programs. gscan2pdf has the scan resolution dropdown menu greyed out and you will be unable to get xsane to present you with a list of resolutions. The answer is that the models.dat shipped with hplip versions under 3.12.10 contains an error.

It is my pleasure to announce, with both great excitement and the inevitable slight sadness, that as of January 2013, I will be leaving the University of Sussex (the inevitable slight sadness) to take a permanent position as a Lecturer in Literature at the University of Lincoln (the great excitement!) I have had several excellent years at Sussex, where I started my Ph.D. in 2009, and have been treated extremely well throughout;

Earlier this week I participated in a small reading group on Adorno's "The Essay as Form" and there was one particularly good sentence from this piece that I thought worth sharing in the light of that discussion as it forms a perfect examples of Adorno's model of the dialectical sentence.

Software to roll-your-own Open Access journal are now fairly easy to get hold of. OJS is available from the Public Knowledge Project as Free Open Source Software, Annotum builds on top of Wordpress and there are forthcoming projects such as Faculty that also broaden the field.

This post is written in response to a question by the ace Bernie Folan, from Sage publishers, who asked whether ORCID has the potential to disrupt, or conversely endorse, the problems in publication driven by accreditation structures. Here's a few of my hastily assembled, initial thoughts... First off, for those who don't know, ORCID is an identifier system for scientists and scholars.

A teenager has been arrested for posting a picture of a burnt remembrance poppy. Nick Griffin walks free despite tweeting the address of a gay couple who won their appeal against discrimination advocating a "British justice squad" who should "show them a bit of drama". Free speech assumes the agency of the speaker, but the justice system presumes the opposite for the listener.

In the past few weeks I've had several peer review requests and it has always struck me that it is far too easy to come across as a heartless bastard when blind reviewing work. That's why I have decided to always be kind in my reviews, even when offering the harshest of criticism.