November 23, 2020
From the Inside Higher Ed piece on the savage Guilford College cuts: In addition to employees, the college will ax majors in math, political science, history, philosophy, geology, economics, peace and conflict studies, chemistry, religious studies, physics, creative...
October 30, 2020
Early results from a DFG-funded study of diamond OA scholar-led journals in Germany: About 20 percent of the titles receive subsidies, mostly from university libraries. The authors aren't sanguine about the other 80 percent: All but a few key journals rely on unpaid...
October 30, 2020
Phil Hill, writing in the Chronicle on the recent University of Arizona acquisition of the for-profit Ashford: Both Arizona and Purdue, with one move, have outwardly leapfrogged their competition and became major players in the online world with a much more diverse...
October 28, 2020
An interesting tidbit, buried in a Scholarly Kitchen post on the implications of COVID for professional associations: At the [American Mathetical Society], our approach is to look to Diamond OA for a new broad-based math journal, Communications of the AMS, launching...
October 28, 2020
This April piece by COPIM's Samuel Moore has aged pretty well: If things were tough already for small, not-for-profit, and university press publishers, they are going to get worse during the downturn. Higher education is predicted to be badly hit by the crisis and...
October 20, 2020
Jonathan Gray, announcing his new collection, co-edited with Martin Eve: MIT Press have recently published a new book on Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access edited by Martin Eve and myself. [...] My...
October 7, 2020
From the press release on the just-released SPARC Europe report copyright and licensing policy [pdf]: Clear from this study: the majority of publishers have yet to embark on a more OA friendly policy journey, though some are making preparations. “If these publishers...
October 7, 2020
A deeply cynical Forbes piece by Kaplan's Brandon Busteed: The current narrative about the edtech industry is that it’s driven by innovative disrupters from outside of education – the proverbial Silicon Valley story of tech entrepreneurs finding solutions to all our...
September 30, 2020
Techcrunch: It’s been a big year for online learning companies — and it sounds like Thinkific is no exception. The Vancouver-based startup is announcing that it has raised $22 million in new funding. Thinkific is different from businesses such as MasterClass (which...
September 30, 2020
From an NSF-funded, cross-university campaign to oil the gears of faculty profiteering: In order to gain broad support for the recognition of [Innovation & Entrepreneurship] within [Promotion and Tenure] guidelines and processes, it is critical that I&E...
September 29, 2020
From the Open Library of Humanities blog: The Open Library of Humanities today celebrates its 5th anniversary since we launched our platform on 28th September 2015 with only 7 journals and 99 supporting institutions. Five years on, our sustainable business model has...
September 29, 2020
"Innovators," the Inside Higher Ed headline has it, "see Zoom University 2.0." By "innovation," though, Inside Higher Ed seems to mean "venture-backed profit-seeking." Here's the latest entrant in the "space":...
September 25, 2020
Techcrunch on a new VC-backed startup, ClassEDU, and its first product, Class for Zoom: Today, Class for Zoom announced that it has raised a $16 million seed round, pre-launch, co-led by Deborah Quazzo of GSV Ventures and Santi Subotovsky of Emergence Capital and a...
September 25, 2020
Kathleen Shearer and the rest of the COAR board writing for LSE Impact: COVID-19 has provided us with a relevant and practical example of the benefits of open science. The current moment should act as a catalyst for transforming the current flawed system of research...
September 11, 2020
Maria Bustillos, in an excellent Nation piece on the publisher lawsuit against the Internet Archive: Penguin Random House, together with fellow megapublishers Hachette, HarperCollins, and Wiley, filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive alleging “mass copyright...
September 10, 2020
Duke University Press, in its announcement that Demography is going platinum OA: Since its founding in 1964, Demography has mirrored the vitality, diversity, high intellectual standard, and wide impact of population studies. Published bimonthly, the journal presents...
September 9, 2020
Lisa Hinchliffe and Roger Schonfeld, in a Scholarly Kitchen post: Today, ResearchGate and Springer Nature are jointly announcing the findings of their syndication pilot. […] Today’s white paper from the partners reports positive responses from authors and plan...
September 8, 2020
From the press release announcing $12 million, from the Charles Koch Foundation among others, to Arizona State University (ASU): ASU’s University Design Institute (UDI) will coordinate the initiative and support other universities to implement their own culture...
September 7, 2020
Richard Fisher’s follow-up Scholarly Kitchen post is as generously minded as the first. But the hippo in the room—monograph funding—is mostly (if not completely) ignored. Fisher imagines a future with more reader-level sales, at lower prices, but suggests (in...
September 4, 2020
Speaking of shady public university deals with for-profits: The University of Arizona has published the asset purchase and sale agreement it struck with Ashford University to create a new online nonprofit institution called the University of Arizona Global Campus....
