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.

A trip down the Yodel depot this morning yielded my copy of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die in which I have a review of Marukami's flawed masterpiece, 1Q84 . The book itself is a lovely object and I'd encourage everybody to have a copy, even if, obviously, the project is doomed to exclude many deserving works.

Frequent readers may recall that I had implemented CLOCKSS support in OJS. I'm sad to say that the original commit was flawed and it was decided that the best thing to do was to revert it, the reason being that there was no selective option to turn off the CLOCKSS manifest. Anyway, after extensive work, I've re-done the patch so that OJS has fully customizable CLOCKSS support that can be enabled and disabled independently from LOCKSS.

23rd March 2013 This one-­day symposium hosted by the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London aims to bring together postgraduates and academics to explore how the issues of feminism, influence and inheritance animate or problematize their work and practice in the field of literary study.

Although I want to preface this with my usual warnings about too much meta, I did speak to the Times Higher Education this week for a piece they were doing on blogging. If you read the original piece, you'll note that the quotation is an elided excerpt, so I thought it worth sharing the full spiel, as I think it comes off very differently. On Academic Blogging was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on November 01, 2012.

Adorno, Theodor W. ‘The Essay as Form’. The Adorno Reader. Trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor & Frederic Will. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 92–111. Print.

I'm pleased to say that my patch to add a CLOCKSS manifest to OJS' LOCKSS page has been merged! This means that anybody who wants to sign up to be archived by CLOCKSS -- which is a subscription-based, geographically distributed dark archive -- will no longer have to modify the OJS manifest to be included.

It seems that 2012 really was the “tipping point” for Open Access, especially in the UK. The Finch Report has mandated OA for RCUK-funded projects and the implementation phase is now hastily underway. No longer can Open Access be seen as a minority issue; it's here and it's here to stay. As one struggle ends, another begins though, like a grim phoenix rising from the ashes.

A quick note to say that David Letzler has very kindly submitted a review of American Postmodernist Fiction and the Past, by Theophilus Savvas that is now live in Orbit 1.2. New Orbit review: American Postmodernist Fiction and the Past, by Theophilus Savvas was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on October 21, 2012.

In my quest to create a set of free and open tools for platinum, scholar-run OA journals, I've just committed a crude, provisional script to my meXml git repository that assists with typesetting into pseudo-NLM format. A few notes. First of all, what does it do? The script parses markup output from the wysihtml5 tool and converts it into near-as-damnit the format I need for typesetting.

I'm pleased to announce that Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon today launched into its second issue. If you visit the journal at present, you may think that the issue is very small -- and you'd be correct. The journal has now moved to a rolling format, however. Articles will be added as and when they pass peer-review, copy-editing, typesetting and proofreading, rather than waiting until a whole batch have all been through this process.