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.

Seriously, just what in God's name do you think you are doing? I am referring, in this bombastic introduction, to the Department of Health's decision to continue to defy the democratic right of the population to see the transition risk register for the proposed NHS shakeup. Let me tell you a few truths about democracy and a few points about risk assessments.

A quick tip that I think it's worth raising, as it's just come to the fore in my life(!), is that the citation style you employ can have a large impact on the number of words over the course of an 80,000 word thesis. I have been using, until today, the Chicago style with a full note on every page.

I did an interview at the weekend with Mark Carrigan on open source solutions for academic publishing and the potential future role of the library.