October 7, 2019
Martin Eve, on a professional association's struggle to go OA: A Learned Society spoke to me last week about what they could do to move to an open-access model. They currently receive about 100,000 EUR per year from their subscription/hybrid-OA publisher but were...
October 3, 2019
Robert Harington, in a new Scholarly Kitchen post: The Plan S transformative agreements have essentially created institutional lock-in businesses on a grand scale. Only publishers who have significant publishing scale may effectively form transformative Publish and...
October 3, 2019
From the press release announcing a three-year, $850,000 grant to MIT Press from Arcadia: Amy Brand, director of the MIT Press and principal investigator for the grant, sees it as an opportunity to explore alternatives to the traditional market-based business model...
October 2, 2019
Roger Schonfeld, in a Scholarly Kitchen post on the emerging data sharing "business landscape": On July 17, Dryad and Zenodo, two leading generalist not-for-profit data repositories built on open source platforms, announced a partnership supported by the...
October 1, 2019
Angela Chochran, in a new post on the Scholarly Kitchen: Leaving behind the silly arguments about what is an acceptable profit margin or surplus, and who decides what kinds of activities one is allowed to do with those surpluses, I want to explore a bit about what I...
September 30, 2019
Sheila Liming in a short essay for the Chronicle Review, on relentless budget cuts at the University of North Dakota: I’m talking about the nonmaterial consequences of material resource depletion, which can last for generations and make earnest attempts at normalcy...
September 29, 2019
Humberto Debat and Dominique Babini, in letter published in Nature: We share the spirit of Plan S to achieve full open access to scholarly publications (see go.nature.com/2hszsaf), but we disagree with its implementation guidelines. The plan’s design ignores more than...
September 27, 2019
Toby Green, writing in the LSE Impact Blog: In a recent case study, I describe how I drew attention to three of my papers published since 2017. This required a change to my normal routine in order to dedicate a little bit of time every day over a period of months to...
September 26, 2019
Springer Nature's Dagmar Laging, in an inteview for the Scholarly Kitchen: But with not only transformative deals but the need to secure sustainable funding for fully OA equally critical to supporting the transition to OA, it was important to us and Projekt DEAL that...
September 25, 2019
Tom Bartlett, in his investigative piece for the Chronicle [paywall] on an apparent criminology research fraud case: But in an interview, the editor in chief of Criminology, David McDowall, seemed less than eager about getting to the bottom of what might be wrong with...
September 24, 2019
Johann Neem, in an interview for Inside Higher Ed: I also don’t think vocational and liberal education can be done well in the same course of study. First, they often have very different ethical orientations, so if part of what constitutes a good college education is...
September 24, 2019
Liz Morrish, writing for the LSE Impact Blog on the UK Teaching Excellence Framework measures: These metrics are not simply benign and have serious implications for academics whose labour is being evaluated along new and unforeseen dimensions. For instance, they must...
September 19, 2019
Inside Higher Ed: President Robbyn Wacker notified faculty members last month that despite ongoing efforts to manage the university’s budget, “we have come to the conclusion that we need to retrench eight tenured and probationary faculty positions from three academic...
September 17, 2019
Martin Paul Eve on scholarly associations: But the truth of the matter is that Learned Societies are funded by academic library budgets. If they rely on a subscription model, they are also reliant on excluding people who cannot pay, for the claimed good of the...
September 16, 2019
Greta Anderson, writing for Inside Higher Ed: Last August, Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn pledged $100 million to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, promising to build a research campus by 2020 and a facility for the College of Engineering, where the company and UW...
September 13, 2019
From the joint statement of participants in the late-August Open Access Tipping Point workshop: While our approaches and strategies may take different forms, we affirm the importance of using journal license negotiations to promote open access to our scholarship and...
September 12, 2019
Buried in the Chronicle's investigative piece on the MIT Media Lab's Caleb Harper: The Media Lab’s funding structure is unusual. The lab’s operating budget is $75 million a year. “Member” companies, which tend to be megacorporations like Google and Nike, pay an annual...
September 11, 2019
Speaking of data-driven university makeovers, I missed this chilling joint statement from three big associations of higher-ed number-crunchers: We strongly believe that using data to better understand our students and our own operations paves the way to developing...
September 10, 2019
Inside Higher Ed on the Lumina Foundation's grant to regional U.S. accreditor: WSCUC will use its $745,000 grant to build on momentum and tools for results-driven accreditation, said Jamienne Studley, the commission's president and a former Education Department...
September 5, 2019
From the initiative's "final newsletter" today: Over the last two years we have tried and failed to raise the funds necessary to make a major and urgent change in the world of scholarly communications. That failure, we think, has more to do with our strategy...
