Marcel Hobma, [writing in the *Journal of Trial and Error*](https://blog.trialanderror.org/not-all-that-shines-is-diamond) on the APC scourge:

> There is evidence that article processing costs give older, more resourceful male researchers and prestigious institutions an advantage over authors from developing countries and early-career authors that are not backed by strong institutions [...] this process can amplify certain publication biases that favour topics and viewpoints that are backed by rich organisations and industries, and therefore distort certain fields of research and possibly steer scientific research away from public interests.

The [piece](https://blog.trialanderror.org/not-all-that-shines-is-diamond) is the best overview of the mounting evidence on the APC regime's exclusions and distortions.

Steven Mintz, writing for Inside Higher Ed on selfish colleagues in the humanities:

[I]f I were to point to a single factor that is most consequential, I’d draw attention to a dramatic shift in humanists’ professional identity. For better and worse, many and perhaps most humanities scholars, from the 1960s onward, identified first and foremost with their discipline, not with their institution or their department, let alone their students. [...] I fear that we are witnessing the rise of a more extreme individualistic “out for themselves” ethic among humanities scholars. In my own department’s building, the hallways are empty except for a handful of students, office doors are closed and locked, and almost all their lights are out. Colleagues teach their classes, then depart to destinations unknown.

The piece—with passing nods to other factors like workload—blames faculty narcissism for what is a structural problem. The swinging 1960s aren’t the reason faculty won’t review manuscripts. It’s profiteering publishers, admin bean-counters, careerist students, and metricized review—academic capitalism—that have stamped out the collective project Mintz mourns.

From the statement:

The crucial role of software in research is becoming increasingly apparent, as is the urgent need to sustain it and to invest in the people who develop and maintain it. Research software sustainability is vitally important for the reproducibility of research outcomes and has a direct bearing on the process of research, including the efficient use of financial and human resources. Funders can play a crucial role in ensuring software sustainability by structurally supporting it. Over the past few years, a variety of methods for sustaining research software have been explored, including improving and extending funding policies and instruments. During an international workshop held on 8-9 November 2022 in Amsterdam, funding organizations joined forces to explore how to effectively contribute to making research software sustainable. This resulted in the Amsterdam Declaration on Funding Research Software Sustainability

There’s lots here on “sustainability” and even open-science standards (“as much as possible”), but not a word—nothing—about the commercial publishers’ acquire-and-stack software strategy.

Wired, reporting on an AI doctoral student’s recent paper:

The Abdallas examined the CVs of 135 computer science faculty who work on AI at the four schools, looking for indications that the researcher had received funding from one or more tech companies. For 52 of those, they couldn’t make a determination. Of the remaining 83 faculty, they found that 48, or 58 percent, had received funding such as a grant or a fellowship from one of 14 large technology companies: Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Intel, IBM, Huawei, Samsung, Uber, Alibaba, Element AI, or OpenAI. Among a smaller group of faculty that works on AI ethics, they also found that 58 percent of those had been funded by Big Tech. When any source of funding was included, including dual appointments, internships, and sabbaticals, 32 out of 33, or 97 percent), had financial ties to tech companies. “There are very few people that don't have some sort of connection to Big Tech,” Abdalla says.

97 percent.

James Nguyen H. Spencer, writing for The Chronicle [paywalled], on a public-financing scheme for U.S. higher education:

Wall Street and Silicon Valley invest in companies expecting financial returns from these expenditures; moreover, they invest in multiple companies anticipating that some will result in returns and others in losses, and that the overall portfolio will generate lucrative profits. Start-ups and other businesses happily overcome upfront financial costs by promising investors a share of future benefits. If a college degree is a great benefit in the marketplace — as it surely is in aggregate — why would students needing financial resources not feel the same way? What if the university itself — with its 100-plus-year history of successful graduates, functional support structures, rigorous admissions processes, and enthusiastic and employed alumni bases — truly saw itself as investing in its students with the expectation that it is building a lifelong financial relationship? I’ve done the math, and initiating a sustainable model is less fantastical than you’d think.

It’s an interesting proposal, but doomed to fail on its own public-good terms. By giving away the game—by explicitly treating a college degree as a personal, lucrative asset—the whole scheme guarantees that the enterprise (to use a loaded word) will still look like a private good.

From the inaugural post from a new blog, courtesy of the OASPA Interest Group of Fully OA journal organizations:

The aim of the group – and now of this blog – is to provide unity, not by creating a single voice, but by bringing together a diversity of different voices and perspectives. […] For the first piece on the blog, we wanted to explore what we share, and where we differ. Featuring contributions from Frontiers, JMIR Publications, MDPI, The Open Library of Humanities, PeerJ, PLOS and Ubiquity, we wanted to share what we see as The Future of Open, how we envisage getting there, and how we might overcome barriers to an open future. 

Glad to see the new blog, but it’s too bad that only two of the six publishers featured are nonprofit—the same proportion that are owned by the oligopolists (Frontiers/SpringerNature and Ubiquity/De Gruyter).