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.

I have a guest post over at the excellent Berfrois in which I review the newly released Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon. The piece is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND license, so I could post the entire thing here, but I'll let you read the entirety over at their site.

Yesterday, Tuesday the 21st of February 2012, I participated in a discussion at the University of Sussex Researcher Hive on copyright and academia, with particular emphasis on doctoral researchers, joined by Sarah Robins-Hobden, Liz Thackray and others. This post will attempt to document some of the ideas we discussed.

In response to the question of why we use secondary sources, one of the most overheard statements in my seminars has to be the perennial student response: "to back up your argument". Last week, I formulated a concise way of thinking about this that dispels this argument and also makes it clear where the space for originality lies.

I am pleased to announce that I will be speaking at the "What Happens Now" conference at the University of Lincoln on twenty-first century fiction.

Ok, so it could really be Wordpress for anybody, but here's the Prezi that I made for a true step-by-step, from the very beginning guide to setting up a new Wordpress-based website. We also covered the beginnings of the information you'd need to customize the site and the benefits of self-hosting. The Prezi is probably only really of use for those who want a basic guide to setting up a new wordpress.com blog.

Feeling confident of my current level of progress, I think it's worth pointing out that the entirety of my doctoral thesis work has been done using free, open source software. I wanted to write a quick overview of my system, explain where it falls down and give an honest appraisal of how it went.

In my previous post, I flagged up a conversation about DOIs that I had with Geoffrey Bilder on Twitter. It was enlightening in many ways; I hadn't appreciated that one of the main challenges faceed by Crossref is a carrot and stick approach to ensure that DOIs really do combat link rot.

Sparked off by a comment on Document Object Identifiers and metrics by Ernesto Priego, I wrote up a brief proposal for the tech side of what I perceived as the function of DOIs.

Following a conversation (well, a complaint and a suggestion) with @ernestopriego on Twitter, the following came to light (and is certainly something I've experienced): DOI numbers are assigned by a central organization called CrossRef. For most quantitive metric computations on academic journal articles, you must assign a DOI. Membership of CrossRef (for a publisher with less than $1m profit(!)) costs $275/year.

Friday, 27th January 2012: 4pm. 2 years and four months into my efforts. The first draft of my Ph.D is now done! I have 81,000 words excluding introduction and conclusion, so some cutting needs to be done. Editing this is going to take at least a couple of months (some parts need beefing up, others paring down), by my estimates, but my last AHRC funding installment arrives in June, so I'm feeling confident.