Maria Bustillos, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review in September:

US libraries, universities, and bookstores rely for the delivery of books on a small number of very big profit-driven companies, many of them privately held, whose commitment to freedom of expression is at best uncertain. The list includes the Follett Corporation ($2.8 billion in annual revenues), Clarivate ($2.6 billion), EBSCO Industries ($3.1 billion), KKR ($22.7 billion), and Ingram Industries ($2.7 billion). Each of these companies represents a potential chokepoint for books and periodicals. They all exercise near-monopolistic control over a piece of the distribution chain, with the capacity to render whole catalogues of e-books inaccessible to library patrons, or to university students, or online book buyers, at the flick of a switch.

It’s a good piece, centered on the rent-not-own status of ebooks (academic and otherwise). Bustillos writes that “building open-source models to connect publishers and libraries directly is imperative”—yes, indeed.

Bustillos, with others in the Brick House Consortium, has built out a suite of open-source apps to let libraries own their ebooks. They call it BRIET, an homage to the late French librarian Suzanne Briet. Their tagline: “Ebooks, for libraries, for keeps.”

The guerrilla initiative isn’t about open access, nor is it aimed at scholarly publishing. But it’s open infrastructure, community-built and -run. And I see that it was built with the help of Codex, which has me curious (and tentatively hopeful) about other AI-assisted infrastructure making. The big commercial publishers, and their defenders, constantly refer to their deep investments in “technology,” to justify their usurious profits. What if we could mimic their infrastructure out from under them?

Science, on Elsevier’s new summary-and-citation tool LeapSpace:

LeapSpace is offering what appears to be one of the largest corpuses of full-text, paywalled papers and books, totaling 18 million. The AI can access articles from Elsevier’s own collection and those of its four partners: Emerald, the Institute of Physics, the New England Journal of Medicine Group, and Sage Publications. (It pays its partners a royalty per use, and the tool gives their articles more exposure.) Elsevier has promised that the analytical reports will not favor citations to its own content, and that users’ queries will be kept private and not used to train the proprietary LLMs, from the OpenAI group, that support LeapSpace.

The whole framing of the piece is around whether it will gain traction with scholars. Fine, but the bigger questions are about the knowledge effects of proprietary summary-and-citation tools like this—and the way that Elsevier keeps skimming new surveillance-publishing cream off its original profiteering off scholars’ donated labor.

LeapSpace? The camel-cased vacuity of the product name is an index for the whole thing: extractive parasitism on the knowledge that human scholars craft.

A side note: The only big commercial publisher playing in the Elsevier garden is Sage, which has been slower (to its credit?) to add prediction products and AI on top of its huge social science journal stack. Elsevier’s real competitors in this AI summary-and-citation space are Digital Science/Springer Nature (with shared parent Holtzbrinck) and quasi-publisher Clarivate. They, like Elsevier, have the proprietary bibliographic databases to power products (even if limited to abstracts and metadata) like LeapSpace.

'Invest in Open Infrastructure announces inaugural grantees of the IOI Fund for Network Adoption'

This from November, an announcement of the initial pair of grantees from Invest in Open Infrastructure’s (IOI) “fund for network adoption”:

Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) is delighted to announce that LA Referencia and UbuntuNet Alliance for Research and Education Networking are the inaugural grantees of the IOI Fund for Network Adoption. Selected from over 100 applications from 22 countries, the proposals from these two networks are ambitious, disruptive, and provide localized solutions to challenges in the open research ecosystem in Africa and Latin America.

The two recipients and their projects are promising, and the whole IOI initiative (despite the gauzy focus on “networks”) is interesting. The focus on the Global South is genuinely exciting.

Still, there haven’t been any real disclosures on the IOI fund’s original goal of $6 to $8 million (announced back in 2023), since a June post reporting that Arcadia (the indispensable UK-based funder) had contributed an unspecified amount. The IOI fund’s $4.5 million was, the June post said, about 75% of the group’s original target.

It would be good to see a full accounting of the fund’s contributors and contributions. (To its great credit, IOI lists all its funders, in clear and transparent form, in this table, though it is not clear if this reflects contributions to the network fund.) According to IOI, network fund donors have included nonprofits like Wellcome but also for-profits like EBSCO and Digital Science—the latter owned by Springer Nature parent Holtzbrinck. Reasonable people can disagree about whether it’s a good idea to take dollars from the likes of EBSCO and Holtzbrinck. But either way, it seems important to have the contributions spelled out as part of the grants roll-out.

More broadly, I wonder about IOI and its purpose, seven years since the group was launched. By all appearances, it is immaculately well-run; its many reports over the years have been informative; its Infra Finder database is useful.

But I have this nagging sense—which I want to explore more carefully, in follow-up posts—that the group, for all its polish and professionalism, has missed the boat on the one big, glaring need in the open infrastructure world: a platform for sustainable funding, one that brings together libraries and foundations with infrastructure makers and maintainers. The core idea has been pioneered in the adjacent space of diamond OA book and journals: funding exchanges that vet publishers and join them to funders who, crucially, share in the platform’s governance and mission. On-the-ground examples include the Open Book Collective, KOALA, OACIP, and the brand-new Open Journals Collective. These are mission-aligned funding exchanges, and they’re working.

I kept expecting that IOI would—motivated by its extensive reporting on landscapes and prospects—commit its considerable clout and resources toward an infrastructure platform like this. If set up with the governance care of the Open Book Collective, such an exchange could—with momentum-generated legitimacy—help provide sustainable support for key, vetted infrastructure builders that, otherwise, die on the grant-window vine.

The “fund for network adoption,” with its large and laudable grants, is not an answer, nor even the beginning of one. The IOI approach is, ironically, the same feast-then-famine grant regimen that has left so many crucial projects in the graveyard.

We need a funding exchange—an Open Infrastructure Collective—to provide lasting and sustainable support. Not one-off grants, however large.

Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt and Sjang ten Hagen, in their introduction to a recent Minerva special issue:

This Special Issue aims to bring these present-day discussions in a productive dialogue with the past, by exploring the relatively recent invention of the anonymous pre-publication “peer review” of research outputs as part of a longer history of scholar-to-scholar evaluation in the humanities.

The history of all aspects of scholarly publishing—peer review, yes, but also the journal and its funding system—should be harnessed against resignation, the sense of nothing-can-change and it-was-always-thus. Verbergt and ten Hagen make the point in their intro:

In a climate of much skepticism and critique of the contemporary peer review process, bringing a broad array of past evaluative practices into view can potentially inspire the future of peer review. By revealing the broad spectrum of evaluative practices that have historically been employed within the humanities, we challenge the present sanctified status of academic (double-)blind and external peer review as the gold standard for quality control in the humanities.

History can, and should, ventilate our imaginations of what’s possible in scholarly publishing.

I missed this piece, from Inside Higher Ed in October:

Campus, on online two-year college backed by Sam Altman and Shaquille O’Neal, has acquired AI learning platform Sizzle AI for an undisclosed amount. 

Campus will integrated Sizzle AI’s interactive, AI-generated content into its online instruction, and faculty will use it to track students’ academic progress to provide more personalized instruction and feedback, the company said in a press release. According to the release, Sizzle AI has more than 1.7 million users. 

The scammy and shameless for-profit higher ed industry—of course it is pivoting to AI.

The acquisition accelerates the online learning platform’s development by two to three years, Tade Oyerinde, founder and chancellor of Campus, said. “They’ve built the best AI team in education and their infrastructure is so far ahead of anyone else—it’s super exciting.”

Founded with the goals of offering low-cost degrees and improving college completion rates, Campus accepted its first cohort of students in 2023 and now serves over 3,000 students, according to its website. It launched as Campuswire in 2016 with seed funding from Altman, CEO of OpenAI; former NBA star O’Neal; Jason Citron, the CEO of Discord; and others. 

An incredible interactive visual map from the Open Book Futures team, on the OA Books landscape:

This is the result of a visual mapping exercise conducted with the stakeholders contributing to the Open Book Futures project, held on Oct 10, 2023 in The Hague and online. […] As the group realised this could be feeding into a larger mapping exercise, we wanted to carry this forward to the next step, creating an interactive version that can be filtered according to a variety of parameters, and so we began experimenting with this interactive Kumu map.

Open Book Futures shared the map in an insightful September blog post.