September 4, 2020
The Century Foundation’s Robert Shireman: In May 2019, Purdue University’s CFO filed a nonprofit tax return (Form 990) with the IRS, followed in August with an application for tax-exempt status (Form 1023).3 Four months later, in December, the IRS granted the...
September 1, 2020
From an Inside Higher Ed commentary on contingency planning for college closures: Even before the pandemic took hold, many colleges were operating on razor-thin margins, with the enrollment trends and demographics of many colleges working against them. Thousands of...
September 1, 2020
Yale Unviersity Press’s Richard Fisher, writing on the Scholarly Kitchen in the first of a two-day post: prior to 2020, no major publisher of academic monographs in the arts and social sciences was reporting print sales as less than 60% of the monographic whole,...
August 29, 2020
Inside Higher Ed's Rick Seltzer, quoting a Moody's analyst: “Some universities previously resistant to change will have to take more expansive steps to adapt to this transformation,” said Pranav Sharma, assistant vice president at Moody’s, in a statement....
August 26, 2020
Ethan Zuckerman, announcing the closure of MIT's Center for Civic Media: Thanks to everyone who's followed our work over the years and lent a hand in one way or another. We have had an extraordinary run, thanks most of all to everyone who's joined us around our table...
July 27, 2020
A modest proposal: Given Coalition S’s recent Rights Retention announcement, what about embracing Elsevier’s cynical invention of the “mirror” journal concept? Recall that Elsevier has, in a stroke of evil genius, created over 40...
July 26, 2020
Daisuke Wakabayashi, writing for The New York Times, buries the lede in his story about big tech’s funding of soft-gloves antitrust education: The long era of restraint in antitrust enforcement in the United States can be traced back, in part, to an ideology...
July 18, 2020
Kate Clark, writing for The Information [paywalled], reports on the major haul that Coursera, the for-profit higher-ed purveyor, received in a new VC round—valuing the company at about $2.5 billion. The pandemic has, of course, been wind to Coursera’s fire—a...
July 17, 2020
From Nature’s story on the Plan S “Rights Retention” announcement: “Very few” publishers allow the combination of both CC-BY and zero-embargo sharing of AAMs, says Bianca Kramer, a librarian at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Publishers often...
July 14, 2020
From a Wired story on so-called income share agreements: ONE DAY IN 2017, Lauren Neuwirth sank into a chair in her university’s financial aid office feeling out of options. She was finishing her second year at Purdue University in Indiana, a school she’d chosen for...
July 4, 2020
Samuel Moore, in a [post on the researcher data clauses increasingly tied into transformative agreements](https://www.samuelmoore.org/2020/07/03/the-datafication-in-transformative-agreements-for-open-access-publishing/): > The datafication embedded within...
July 2, 2020
A [sharp and unflinching call from Sara Matthiesen for faculty to not just analyze and critique, but organize](https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-to-Stop-the-Cuts/249023) against higher-ed's never-let-a-crisis-go-to-wasters: > As the labor negotiator, strategist,...
July 2, 2020
From this morning's [wince-inducing LSE Impact post](https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/07/02/to-build-a-better-world-after-covid-19-now-is-the-time-to-transform-how-we-think-about-social-science-commercialisation/): > Social sciences research is not...
June 25, 2020
[Dangerous gibberish from an *Inside Higher Ed* commentary](https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/06/25/higher-education-has-much-learn-world-work-opinion), on never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste grounds: > Before, [colleges and universities] represented only a...
June 25, 2020
Some mid-COVID changes at university presses, as [collected](https://sr.ithaka.org/blog/university-presses-in-the-age-of-covid-19/) by [Ithaka S+R](https://sr.ithaka.org) in its [latest press directors'...
June 23, 2020
Martin Kurzweil and Josh Wyner, [in a *Times* opinion piece decrying the decades-long drift toward "merit" aid (i.e., not based on need) in U.S. higher ed](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/opinion/coronavirus-college-rich-kids.html): > Some leaders of colleges have...
June 19, 2020
Meanwhile, [in Australia](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-19/university-fees-tertiary-education-overhaul-course-costs/12367742): > The cost of studying humanities at university is set to double, but "job-relevant" course fees will be slashed under an overhaul of...
June 18, 2020
The headline for a much-shared [*Wired* story](https://www.wired.com/story/universities-step-up-the-fight-for-open-access-research/) on the University of California's [read-and-publish...
June 15, 2020
Chloe Reid, in an LSE Review of Books [review](https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/01/26/book-review-indebted-how-families-make-college-work-at-any-cost-by-caitlin-zaloom/) of Caitlin Zaloom's...
June 15, 2020
From Logic's May [interview with Alison Macrina](https://logicmag.io/security/free-as-in-smash-the-surveillance-state-alison-macrina-on-library-freedom/): > **Q:**With both [Tor](https://www.torproject.org) and the [Library Freedom...
