Moving On: My Infrastructural Turn | Martin Paul Eve, Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing

by Martin Paul Eve The next few months mark a series of “10”s for me. On the 10th September, it will be 10 years since my Ph.D. viva. In November, it will be 10 years since I got my first lecturing position (TT Assistant Prof) at the University of Lincoln. It’s 10 years since I met Dr Caroline Edwards and we began publishing Alluvium together. And it’s 10 years since we began planning the Open Library of Humanities. The times they are, as Dylan said, a-changing. I have some professional news. I am delighted to say that I will be joining Crossref as Principal R&D Developer at the end of this year. This is a great move for me, allowing me to continue my development work around metadata and scholarly communications while having space to do a deep dive into the infrastructural technologies that underpin contemporary academic publishing. As is customary, I also wanted to use this opportunity to give a few notes on why I (an apparently successful and productive academic) am making this move. I should note that I am retaining my Professorship at Birkbeck, University of London; an institution that I am proud to represent and serve. For 200 years this College of the University of London has provided education to people to whom it was traditionally denied. This has never been more vital and remains core to my ethos. I will continue to supervise Ph.D. students in my areas. But I also want, at this point, to do something different and to get my hands dirty in research and development. I’ve realised, over the past few months, how much I enjoy technical development projects and that I would like to spend more of my time working on them. [...]