Like most years, a mixed bag for me here. Kidney failure continues to be a truly challenging medical fiasco, with AV fistulas, overnight dialysis, hormone therapies, and much much more. I also continue to feel the severe difficulties of my rheumatoid arthritis, which required a hip replacement in April.

For most of this year, I worked at Crossref – until I was made redundant (at the end of November) due to the abolition of Crossref Labs (as anyone on LinkedIn will be able to see, almost all members of the Labs/R&D team are now looking for work and the remaining member on the Crossref website is listed as now belonging to the “data science” department instead of R&D). This was deeply frustrating. I was hired to start in January 2023. It is well known that I am a vulnerable individual with serious long-term (in fact, terminal) health conditions, most notably kidney failure that requires dialysis 5 times per week. I was hired away from a tenured-equivalent full Professorship at a university; a very secure position. Yet, relatively soon after starting, my department was abolished.

I should note that my performance at Crossref was never questioned. My annual development review feedback was extremely positive and I was told that the redundancy was no reflection on my performance. My work at Crossref – and particularly my publication record while there – has attracted great attention and been covered in/by Nature News, New Scientist (23rd March 2024, p. 48), Ars Technica, Research Professional, Research Information, the LSE Impact Blog, the Digital Preservation Coalition, CLOCKSS, Research Buzz, InfoDoc MicroVeille, DigitalKoans, and FE News. Furthermore, earlier this year I was awarded the Association of University Presses StandUP Award. I was particularly pleased that Nature ran an editorial just recently starting with my digital preservation work indicating the clear community value of this work. It is a shame that I won’t get to continue this work at Crossref.

It is also, in my opinion, a shame that Labs is no more and I do not understand the decision when, as above, we were attracting such community interest. The Crossref R&D Department (“Labs”) has been responsible for so many of their community successes over the past two decades and more recently. Similarity Check, ORCID, CrossMark, the REST API, Participation Reports, Metadata Search, Funder Ref, ROR, Chooser, Labs Reports, Matching, and Retraction Watch were all products originally of the Labs/R&D team.

In any case, moving on. I did quite a bit of publishing and writing this year, with a fair few pieces lined up for near future.

Books

2025 Eve, Martin Paul, Star Trek: Voyager: Critical and Historical Approaches to Ethics, Politics, and the End of the 1990s (Michigan: Lever Press, 2025)

2024 Eve, Martin Paul, Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2024) [Download]

Peer-Reviewed Articles

2024 Ketzan, Erik, and Martin Paul Eve, ‘The Anxiety of Prestige in Stephen King’s Stylistics’, Journal of Computational Literary Studies, 3.1 (2024), 1–20 [Download]

  Eve, Martin Paul, ‘Digital Scholarly Journals Are Poorly Preserved: A Study of 7 Million Articles’, Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 12.1 (2024) [Download]

Book Chapters

2025 Eve, Martin Paul, ‘Shadow Libraries and Pirate Infrastructures’, in Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities, ed. by Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, and James Smithies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2025)

  Eve, Martin Paul, ‘“Contains Scenes of Mild Peril”: Illuminating the Catalogues of Dark Archives’, in Library Catalogues as Data: Research, Practice, and Usage, ed. by Melissa Terras, Paul Gooding, and Sarah Ames (London: Facet, 2025)

  Eve, Martin Paul, ‘Digital Piracy’, in Handbuch Soziale Praktiken Und Digitale Alltagswelten, ed. by Heidrun Friese, Marcus Nolden, and Miriam Schreiter (Berlin: Springer, 2025)

2024 Eve, Martin Paul, ‘The Essay in the Career of the Contemporary English Novelist’, in The Cambridge History of the British Essay, ed. by Denise Gigante and Jason Childs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), pp. 681–95 [Download]

I also spoke at quite a few conferences, albeit virtually due to my poor state of health.

Conference Papers/Events

2024 Eve, Martin Paul, Ryan Cordell, Sarah Bull, Lise Jaillant, and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, ‘AI In the Communications Circuit’ (presented at the SHARP 2024 Annual Conference, Reading, 2024)

  Eve, Martin Paul, ‘“Begin at the Beginning, the King Said, Very Gravely”: Serious Openings and Subversive Epigraphs in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon’ (presented at the Preface, Prelude, Prologue, Lewes, 2024) [Download]

  Ketzan, Erik, and Martin Paul Eve, ‘The Anxiety of Prestige in Stephen King’s Stylistics’ (presented at the 3rd Annual Conference of Computational Literary Studies, Vienna, 2024) [Download]

  Eve, Martin Paul, ‘How Safe Are Digital Journals? A Study of 7m Articles’ (presented at the Seminar, University of Leeds, 2024)

  Eve, Martin Paul, ‘Accessibility, Publishing, and Disability​’ (presented at the BAAS Early Career Article Development Workshop, Online, 2024)

I hope to have some more news about my next steps, soon. In the meanwhile, I am doing some contract work hacking away at Janeway, building out some scholcomms features that we’ve wanted for a while!

References

This reference list has been generated, in many cases, through an automated process and may therefore contain errors or incomplete metadata. It is provided purely as assistance for finding the items mentioned within this post.

  1. ‘Act now to stop millions of research papers from disappearing’, Nature, 26 November 2024 <https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03842-z>
  2. Download: anxiety of prestige in Stephen King article <https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/document/323621>
  3. Download: digital scholarly journals poorly preserved article <https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/document/316883>
  4. Download: essay in career of contemporary English novelist <https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/document/322638>
  5. Download: serious openings in Pynchon talk <https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/document/320373>
  6. Download: Stephen King stylistics CCLS 2024 paper <https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/document/320161>
  7. Download: Theses on Metaphors of Digital-Textual History <https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/document/322077>
  8. Eve, Martin Paul, Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History, 1 January 2024 <https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/31744>
  9. Eve, Martin Paul, ‘Digital Scholarly Journals are Poorly Preserved: A Study of 7 Million Articles’, Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 24 January 2024 <https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/51899>
  10. Eve, Martin Paul, ‘Shadow Libraries and Pirate Infrastructures’, 20 January 2026 <https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/50133>
  11. Eve, Martin Paul, ‘“Contains Scenes of Mild Peril”: Illuminating the Catalogues of Dark Archives’, 14 June 2025 <https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/53704>
  12. Eve, Martin Paul, ‘The Essay in the Career of the Contemporary English Novelist’, 16 August 2024 <https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/43087>
  13. Eve, Martin Paul, Ryan Cordell, Sarah Bull, Lise Jaillant, and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, ‘AI In the Communications Circuit’, 3 July 2024 <https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/53717>
  14. Eve, Martin Paul, ‘'Begin at the beginning, the King said, very gravely': Serious Openings and Subversive Epigraphs in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon’, 5 June 2024 <https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/53252>
  15. Eve, Martin Paul, ‘How Safe Are Digital Journals? A Study of 7m Articles’, 29 February 2024 <https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/53158>
  16. Eve, Martin Paul, ‘Accessibility, Publishing, and Disability’, 11 January 2024 <https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/52808>
  17. Eve, Star Trek Voyager book (Lever Press 2025), BIROn <https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/52007>
  18. ‘GitHub - openlibhums/janeway: A web-based platform for publishing journals, preprints, conference proceedings, and books’, GitHub <https://github.com/openlibhums/janeway/>
  19. Ketzan and Eve, anxiety of prestige in Stephen King, JCLS 2024 <https://jcls.io/article/id/3915/>
  20. Ketzan and Eve, Stephen King stylistics, CCLS Vienna 2024 <https://jcls.io/media/journals/12/CCLS2024_Conference_Reader.pdf>
  21. Paul, Eve, Martin, ‘Digital Piracy’, Handbuch Soziale Praktiken Und Digitale Alltagswelten, 6 April 2025 <https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/54717>