There's a Q&A with me that has just been published in Library Journal on why we need a public library of the humanities and social sciences (a "PLOS-like" project -- but not officially affiliated). Meanwhile the project continues to make progress; we're currently building up the various committees and the infrastructure that is needed for these groups to communicate!

Just to share my response to a comment on the PLOHSS project from somebody who claimed that: Any form of APC was unacceptable All APCs would be viewed as vanity publication Me: I think the "vanity publishing" argument is totally fallacious; it's clear that the review process would be completed utterly independently well before any consideration of finance would be made.

An email that I just sent out to people who have expressed an interest. If you'd like to know more, visit http://www.plohss.org or email me with "PLOHSS" in the topic. Dear all, First of all, I must express my sincere gratitude to everybody who responded to my call; the enthusiasm so far has been overwhelming and humbling, so my thanks for that.

For quite some time, I have been interested in/incensed by the scholarly publication system; the exclusions, iniquities and absurdities of it can be clearly seen from only a brief survey of the economic field. I have watched with despair as the sciences have made projects work while the humanities and social sciences have almost sleepwalked into a disaster.

Ron Charles has tweeted that a new Pynchon novel will be published by Penguin in Fall 2013. Entitled Bleeding Edge the work will not quite be out in time for International Pynchon Week 2013, but... wow. Charles stated that two Penguin employees had confirmed the news to him and there's already a piece up about it at The Huffington Post. Let the PYNCHON-L speculation begin!

It is not worth trying to restore a Windows partition using dd unless you restore it to *exactly* the same offset on the new drive. Even then it might not work. No amount of dicking around with bootrec fixmbr rebuildbcd etc. will solve this. A fresh Windows install that complains that it is missing the "cd/dvd driver" actually means that there's a problem reading the DVD you've booted from. Do this by USB instead.

Getting this to work has been the bane of my morning, so here's what I did to eventually get it working: {% highlight bash %} sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia linux-headers-generic sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) sudo apt-get install nvidia-current {% endhighlight %} Edit

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.