Today, the SoAS was host to the Contemporary Fiction Research Seminar, marking the release of a special issue of Textual Practice on Martin Amis' Money . The panel consisted of Nicky Marsh, Chris Hartley, Matthew Crowley, Bianca Leggett and Joe Brooker. There was also a conversation with the novelist Alex Preston, but I unfortunately had to leave before this point. This is a brief post to document the seminar.

2nd Jul 2012 Checkland, Falmer Campus, University of Brighton, UK A one-day symposium hosted by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) and the Faculty of Arts, University of Brighton Cost: FREE (Space Strictly Limited) Deadline for proposals: 15th May 2012 Visit the webpage: http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/research/research-conferences/teaching-post-millennial-literature Keynotes: Dr David James (University of Nottingham) and Prof Peter Boxall

Here's the video of my talk to the UKSG Conference in Glasgow in June 2012. In the contemporary publish-or-perish culture, very few academics query the mechanisms through which their work is distributed. At the same time, academic libraries and publishers are playing a dangerous power game in which each threatens the existence of the other in their own bid to stay afloat.

As part of a transparent development process, I wanted to announce that I'm starting, thanks to some funding and support from a colleague at Sussex, a Digital Humanities project that focuses upon object annotation and cross-medium comparison. The project is called epiLog and will be available during development on my github. The Concept I constantly make annotations on books, films, photographs and many other objects.

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.