August 16, 2021
Scott Galloway, in a [breezy TechCrunch interview last March](https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/11/professor-scott-galloway-just-raised-30-million-for-an-online-school-that-upskills-managers-fast/) about his VC-backed startup offering short-run "sprint" class with...
August 16, 2021
Bo-Christer Björk, [in his sharp if studiously neutral account of high journal costs](https://harisportal.hanken.fi/en/publications/why-is-access-to-the-scholarly-journal-literature-so-expensive), based on Michael Porter's [five forces...
August 12, 2021
A pair of revealing anecdotes from [this *Insights* piece](https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.533/) on a two-book OA collaboration between the University of Liverpool's press and library. One of the authors (protected from shame as "Author B") turned in a...
August 11, 2021
I missed this when it [launched back in June](https://thesociologicalreview.org/announcements/news/welcome-to-our-new-open-acjcess-publishing-platform/): > The Sociological Review, the home for critical sociological thinking and research in the UK and internationally...
July 30, 2021
COPIM's Samuel Moore, in a new blog post that makes a substantive (as opposed to market-power) case for small-scale publishing: Consider […] that publishing is a situated activity. It benefits from editorial care, community involvement and scholarly experimentation....
July 10, 2021
This is a novelty: APCs for paywalled articles, here in the case of the now-notorious American Journal of Health Behavior: There are NO submission fees; however, should your manuscript be accepted for publication, there will be a one-time fee of $895 per article. This...
July 7, 2021
Genuinely exciting news: We’re thrilled to announce that OA Works (formerly Open Access Button) has received a grant of $1.9M USD over the next three years from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The investment expands OA.Work’s efforts to streamline...
July 7, 2021
My reaction to the sell-off of edX, published today in The Chronicle: Harvard and MIT have, in effect, auctioned off the lecture halls of the future. It’s a short-sighted move reminiscent of another infrastructure transfer, in scholarly publishing. As early as the...
July 6, 2021
Arvind Dilawar, writing for The Nation: Both the University of Vermont’s president and the dean of its College of Arts and Sciences explicitly cited the pandemic when discussing the need for cuts in 2020, but school administrators now deny that the proposed...
June 29, 2021
Speaking of money-losing higher ed-tech IPOs, Canvas maker Instructure announced its own planned offering on Monday, citing the pandemic boom-times. As part of an acquisition announced in December, Instructure bought a K-12 student-snooping software Videri:...
June 28, 2021
From the detailed March Inside Higher Ed story on Coursera's planned IPO: Although it is still possible to audit many Coursera courses for free, the company has evolved significantly since its early days as a provider of massive open online courses, or MOOCS. The...
June 24, 2021
SPARC North America's Claudio Aspesi, in an April piece in the Commonplace: The core activities of senior academic administrators are threatened by algorithms that could effectively dictate how to increase research productivity, climb rankings, or raise graduation...
June 9, 2021
Missed this great short piece by Dafne Calvo when it ran last May: At present, knowledge runs the risk of being capitalised by investing in proprietary software for analysis; by imposing fees for downloading scientific articles; by making methodological and...
June 3, 2021
I only just read the dueling December posts on the OASPA blog—the first an alarm-puller on the "growing emphasis" on green OA, which the signatories—a diverse lot, indeed—blamed Plan S for fanning (in part owing to its recently announced Rights Retention...
June 2, 2021
Speaking of the [recent COPIM report on collective funding](https://zenodo.org/record/4501512#.YLeBLS_3afB), here's an excerpt on stealth for-profit [Knowledge Unlatched](https://knowledgeunlatched.org): > In 2016, key parts of Knowledge Unlatched were bought by Sven...
May 25, 2021
Chris Triggle and co-authors, in the closing paragraph of their excellent article on research metrics: Considering the wider publishing landscape, Brembs (2019) has argued for replacing the legacy journals completely, with peer-review and publishing infrastructure...
May 20, 2021
An important commentary from the Knowledge Futures Group leads responsible for PubPub and the Underlay, reacting to Clarivate's ProQuest acquisition: These days, Elsevier and other major publishing companies operate more like Clarivate, an analytics company that not...
May 13, 2021
From a sobering new post on SciDev.Net: [F]or many researchers in the developing world, who do not have a grant or an institution to cover the fees, the open access system can lock them out of top tier academic journals. Bonaventure Tetanye Ekoe, honorary dean of the...
May 12, 2021
From the superb, just-released COPIM report on collective funding models, which interviewed academic librarians: According to some of our respondents, the funds potentially available to support library membership programmes were also being squeezed by the rise of...
May 12, 2021
Emily Farrell, in a Scholarly Kitchen post: Monographs, by their nature as specialized texts, often see low usage. Scholarly publishers are aware that in order to support a diverse program of scholarship, it can be necessary to subsidize, in part, long-form works that...
