September 4, 2023
Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Silicon Valley for-profit Coursera, on the Coursera blog: The job market is changing rapidly, and to meet new employer and student demands, universities must also evolve. Today, I’m excited to announce that Coursera and the University of...
August 28, 2023
Philip Cohen, on his blog, addressing the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) shameful obstructionism on open access: Alondra Nelson has had a storied career in American social science. After joining the Yale sociology faculty in 2009, she wrote, among many...
August 17, 2023
Speaking of the MIT Press, sometime in mid-April the press’s OA books began including a full-book, single-button download.1 Finally! As I and others have complained, the chapter-by-chapter download mode used by JSTOR, Project MUSE, and a number of OA publishers (MIT...
August 17, 2023
An excellent Chronicle piece [paywalled, alas] from Sarah Kember (Goldsmiths Press) and Amy Brand (the MIT Press), on the slate of well-intentioned OA policies from the U.S., Europe, and Britain: As the heads of progressive university presses on two sides of the North...
August 15, 2023
Martin Eve: For me, the fundamental meta-principle, or ideal, that underpins POSI (the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure) is forkability and persistence. Taken on aggregate and implemented, an organization that signs up for POSI should be duplicable. That...
August 15, 2023
The Royal Society of Chemistry, announcing still-more transformative [sic] agreements: The growth of transformative agreements within the North America region includes multiple read and publish deals in the USA and new country deals in Mexico and Canada. This builds...
August 14, 2023
Gaynor Redvers-Mutton of the Biochemical Society, in an [interview with Scholastica](https://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/cultivating-sustainable-in-house-publishing-pt2/) on the Society’s disastrous dalliance with APCs: > Commercially, the rationale inbuilt to the...
August 14, 2023
Goldie Blumenstyk, [writing for *The Chronicle*](https://www.chronicle.com/newsletter/the-edge/2022-07-27) [paywalled] on her conversation with Cathie Smith, interim head of the nonprofit slated to inherit $800 million from the...
July 10, 2023
Lars Wenaas, in a 2002 Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analysis study of Norwegian read-and-publish (i.e., “transformative”) deals, found that the deals drove scholars to publish in high-prestige hybrid journals over full-OA journals and green repositories. Hardly a...
June 27, 2023
A good story, from Fast Company, on social media sites’ discrimination against researchers: Independent researchers have used web scraping to reveal large-scale disinformation operations, horrifying malfunctions in platform algorithms, and more. But scraped data isn’t...
June 23, 2023
From the press release announcing Clarivate’s partnership with AI21 Labs (“a pioneer in generative artificial intelligence”): The collaboration will integrate large language models into solutions from Clarivate, to enable intuitive academic conversational search and...
June 23, 2023
Simmons University, a Boston women’s college, is cutting literature, philosophy, and sociology, among other majors—according to Inside Higher Ed. Enrollment is way down, but another challenge is the institution’s for-profit online-ed “partner”: President Lynn Perry...
June 22, 2023
Steven Inchcoombe, “Chief Publishing Officer” at Springer Nature, in a January Scholarly Kitchen interview, asked what publishing innovation he’s most proud of: For me, I look at the work we have been doing using AI to enable summarizations (for different levels of...
May 30, 2023
From the Open Access Week announcement: “Community over Commercialization” is the theme for this year’s International Open Access Week (October 23-29). This theme encourages a candid conversation about which approaches to open scholarship prioritize the best interests...
March 4, 2023
The Ivy Plus Libraries have come out swinging against APCs in their Nelson Memo statement: It is in that spirit that we want to highlight the dangers of allowing the interests of commercial publishers to dictate the paths available to implementing this bold new...
February 21, 2023
Alex McLean, writing for on his blog about the treasure hunt required to find OA copies of his new book, despite a $15,000 subvention to MIT Press: Although all copies of the book are openly licensed into the creative commons, some are nonetheless paywalled. Indeed,...
February 14, 2023
Alicia Wise and Lorraine Estelle, writing in Insights: The realization of a transformative deal can be a complex and time-consuming process. Success is not only determined based on the results of the negotiation process, but also in the execution of the contract. To...
February 9, 2023
A good statement from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (publisher of Science): Gold OA journals, for which authors pay publication charges, work for senior scientists who are well-funded, tenured, and overwhelmingly male and white, but not so...
February 9, 2023
More surveillance publishing from Springer Nature: Demonstrating research impact and setting a comprehensive strategy are critical tasks for any research organisation, but gathering trustworthy insights can be difficult and time-consuming. To support organisations in...
February 9, 2023
From AZ Inno: “VR edtech company connected to ASU raises $20M in series A funds”. The lede: An immersive learning educational technology company developed in collaboration with Arizona State University has raised $20 million in series A funding as it continues...
