March 20, 2021
From the annual report of MDPI, the Swiss-based for-profit OA bohemoth: 165.2K peer-reviewed manuscripts published online, an increase of 55.6% in comparison to the previous year; 50 new journals launched, and 13 journals transferred to MDPI; 35 days used from...
March 17, 2021
MIT Libraries' Chris Bourg, quoted in an Inside Higher Ed story on the UC-Elsevier deal: “If pay-to-publish models (whether multi- or single-payer) become the new norm, they will inevitably lead to a system where the work of scholars from less-privileged institutions...
March 10, 2021
The most exciting aspect of MIT Press's Direct to Open OA book initiative is that library-participant fees are set, in part, according to ability to pay: To determine fees that allow the offer to reach the revenue target, the Press: Assessed the total universe of...
March 9, 2021
I finally got around to reading the forensic Chronicle account of turmoil at the anthropology journal HUA. The story, by Jesse Singal, is worth a read—it is an impressively thorough and fair-minded act of journalism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the APC shows up in one of...
March 8, 2021
Here's an idea, premised on a pair of observations: (1) open access is now inevitable, at least for the journal literature; but in (2) an APC/read-and-publish package. There are lots of exceptions and byways, but the momentum—thanks in part to Plan S—is with an OA...
February 16, 2021
A Salesforce exec, in an October post hawking the company's software tools : In a matter of months, higher education institutions have had to reinvent themselves from physical hubs of learning to digital enablers of the student journey. And while no one knows exactly...
