Hi Duncan - I work with about six collections in Wellesley College's iTunes U site. Is there any specific information that might help you?
Late last afternoon around 2-3, I was able to publish my item (essentially by going to the item which was already visible in the collection and resaving it/signing out very quickly before the timeout had a chance to get me.) After that, I had noticed that the timeouts were no longer occuring as quickly, but the next time I logged in I got an odd error when I clicked the "return to collections manager" link. Unfortunately I did not think to copy the error, though it was a white page and looked like some sort of script error.
However, when I went back to take a screenshot of it today, everything looks fine as far as I can see. No unnaturally quick timeouts or links throwing errors. (I do still get the "sorry, currently being edited" if I close the browser on a collection without properly signing out, but as far as I'm aware that is normal.)
I will try to find some new content to upload and report back if there are any problems with that. But for now it looks like we're fine here.
Best of luck with your own, Syd.