I would be interested to hear more about issues of academic labor in relationship to OA in specific. One of the issues that we continue to encounter in forms of what we have called more 'radical' open access practices, in specific academic-led projects and experimental publishing endeavours, is that the amount of free labour increases significantly (and this is of course what publishers traditionally offer to researchers, they facilitate many of the publishing processes). So, where there has been a call to only give one's free academic labour to NFP or open access initiatives (and not to Elsevier or Academia.edu for example), although this might be a more ethical use of academic labour, this does not solve the underlying issue of 'un(der)paid labor' in academia as such. So does this mean we need to work towards more recognition for the types of free labor academics do (from reviewing to editing, to board memberships, to what have you?) and to have this included more directly in impact statements etc. Or does this just lead to a further instrumentalisation of academic job specifications? Is there a tension here too between narratives that see this kind of work as part of an academic 'gift economy' versus those that stress 'free and un(der)paid labour'?

One possibility of the blog as a research method might perhaps be that it aids in the creation of what I have called elsewhere 'differential publications'. In my own thesis, which made use of a research blog as part of its practical methodology, I used a blog to specifically highlight the processual and collaborative nature of research. A blog allowed me to do this better than traditional print-based (or email-based) forms of communication could in that respect. Yet, it also remains rather limited in what it can do as a medium, and blogs still tend to have a strong authorial voice, and remain limited in their collaborative and multimodal possibilities. Also see: http://www.openreflections.org/?page_id=45

The research blog or blogging as a research method is an intriguing question indeed. But what makes a blog, or better said, the specific usage of a blog into a suitable scholarly 'method' -- for you and/or for others? A blog in itself is a medium/a publishing platform. A method then is a certain approach to a blog, how you implement it into research strategies. If you make the case for (a specific use of) a blog, what makes it a potentially more useful research method (for you and others) than, for example, methods based on the usage of other (print-based) media?

A similar project that explores the potential and limits of POD is AND's Variable Format: 'a sample book, a model, a serial system that explores the technological margins of print on demand and how reading is informed by the materiality of the book object'.

This project has been conceived by Lynn Harris, published by AND and designed by Åbäke with Pierre Pautler:

http://www.andpublishing.org/variable-format/and-variable-format/