In which I look nervous and shifty. Please note: this post's featured image is licensed and not shared under a CC license. The future of academic publishing Q&A was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on April 09, 2012.

On the train back from Glasgow last week, I finished writing a piece for 3:AM Magazine that sums up part of my Ph.D. thesis work, which I intend to submit in June this year. With apologies for a self-promotional post (although I think of it as "self-archiving"), I was thrilled to find this morning that the New York Times have written about the piece! New York Times writes about my Ph.D. thesis work!

Last week I attended, and presented a keynote in the opening plenary at, my first academic publishing conference: the UK Serials Group conference. As I'm usually confined to English Literature, this was a bizarre experience; they put me up in a hotel, the conference meal was included free with drinks and a band + dancing, all my travel was covered. It was also massive. 860 delegates outstrips any conference that I've attended for literature.

I'm delighted to announce that I am joining the OAPEN-UK Steering Group, a great JISC project that is gathering evidence for the viability of Open Access monograph publication in the Humanities and Social Sciences. From their website: I was really excited to hear about their project at the UKSG conference in Glasgow and look forward to talking more about this at a later stage.

A growing criticism mounted by students/parents of students is the trite argument that there are too few contact hours. Anybody who works as a researcher/lecturer/tutor can demolish this argument in two seconds flat, but the problem now seems to be extending to HR managers, who apparently think that their staff only work about 1/2 the year (ie. when students are around). Let me point something out.

So, it looks, with the easy reach of software such as Open Journal Systems and Annotum, as though anybody can create a journal. This is, to a large extent, true. It comes, however, with a problem. Even assuming that you get the editorial board together, have a great first issue and the journal continues, what happens (to take an extreme case) if the server admin dies (I mean real, physical human death)? What happens to the content?

I've been asked, by Salma Patel and The Thesis Whisperer to write a post on finishing a Ph.D. under the UK system within 3 years. I have to confess, first off, to feeling slightly uneasy writing this. My thesis is yet to be examined. I will, however, have completed a work that both my supervisors feel will pass the Ph.D. examination, within a three-year timespan.

I have been asked, by an EdTech researcher called Jen Rhee, to share this graphic, which comes courtesy of Open-Site under a CC-BY-ND license, in order to solicit further comments. Aside from the pedantic tic that I had when reading "amount of books", the graphic is pretty interesting.

I am pleased to announce that I will be speaking at the “Transforming Objects” conference at Northumbria University in May this year. Thomas Pynchon has been critically considered, for almost the whole of his writing career, to hold an idealist stance, both epistemologically and ontologically. Objects, in the strange counter-universe of his novels, are held to be projections, unrealities of deluded questing subjects.

Yesterday I had the extremely good fortune to see Talawa's production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot at the Albany Theatre in Deptford. It had been hyped in the media as the first British all-Black Godot. While the ethnicity of the performers is integral to the performance and the skills, speech patterns, accents and mannerisms that they bring, it didn't need this hype.

My incredibly talented friend, Jake Wilson, has composed a series of Folk-Rock songs based on the diary entries of Robert Scott on his ill-fated expedition to the Pole. I thought it worth pointing out that the website for this is now up. Opportunities to purchase the album to be added in the near future, but for now you can listen to all the songs.