I'm delighted to say that I have taken up an editorship, alongside Professor Bryan Cheyette, of the Bloomsbury New Horizons in Contemporary Writing series. I think this is an exciting time and opportunity to consider what it means to study contemporary writing in the present age and to deliberate upon the diverse methodologies, approaches, and concerns in my area of academic work. We therefore invite proposals as per the call below.

I don't know David Golumbia, but I suspect I agree with him on many matters, actually. In particular, the centrality of an understanding of labour within a digital environment (that can too often mask its presence) has formed a core part of the 100+ keynotes that I have given on the topic of open access in the past two years (which is why OLH runs a model that requires universities to pay: we aren't relying on volunteerism etc.

I've been gearing up for quite some time to write about the false labour dichotomies in the academy that seem to be emerging that put "academic labour" as some privileged space of difference from other types. This isn't that post, which I haven't had time to work on yet, but it is related. I don't usually agree with everything that Daniel Allington writes. And that's fine. Spice of life etc.

In [_Open Access and the Humanities_](http://meve.io/oahums), I wrote: >the case study I have opted to focus upon for this model is Open Book Publishers (OBP), a new small press based in Cambridge, UK and headed by Alessandra Tosi, a fellow of Clare Hall, and run by Rupert Gatti, a fellow of Trinity College.

A [post today at the Scholarly Kitchen](https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/08/24/the-costs-of-flipping-our-dollars-to-gold/) has spurred me to write something that I've been pondering for a while. Namely: how helpful is this idea of "[paying it forward](http://icis.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/UC-Pay-It-Forward-Final-Report.rev_.7.18.16.pdf)" as a way of funding scholarly communications?

Somebody, and I can't remember who (so treat this as a straw argument if you want), argued with me a while back that there was a problem with open access because it was driven by technological possibility. That I wanted people to be able to read things without paying because technology made it possible was apparently a bad thing because, ya know, technology. Now, I'm not actually averse to thinking critically about technology.

I'm probably not the first to think these thoughts, but I thought I would write them anyway as they are fresh in my mind. When dealing with computational reading methods, it is easy to encounter an aesthetic/teleological opposition to stylometry from some quarters.

Today, my peer-reviewed journal article on the publishing history of the two substantially different versions of David Mitchell's _Cloud Atlas_ was published. You can read the full article in all its open access glory at the Open Library of Humanities . There's also [a press release about the work](http://www.bbk.ac.uk/news/birkbeck-research-uncovers-publishing-problems-in-popular-contemporary-fiction) on Birkbeck's main site.

Something that occurred to me about the Stern review of REF and the proposed non-portability of research outputs is how this changes the relationship of funding to researchers vs. funding an environment.

Lord Stern's review of the Research Excellence Framework is out today in the UK. Not as exciting as the fact that my book is also out today, I know, but still a marginally important publication, I suppose. The biggest recommended change in the report is that institutional submissions be decoupled from researchers. In other words, institutions must submit _all_ research-active staff BUT not every researcher has to submit four outputs.

One of the aspects of the Stern review that has attracted the most attention from my Twitter stream is the non-portability of research outputs. What this means is that institutions cannot poach staff from elsewhere and use their outputs to return to REF. Now, there's a problem with Stern at the moment in that he doesn't say what will happen with ECR/Ph.D. student outputs when they move to their first post with a research element.