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 is: I should be able, as a reasonably technically competent individual, to acquire all the components of a POSI-posse signatory, and rebuild/resurrect their technical architecture.

Adds Eve:

Certainly, this can be a scary proposition to those unschooled in thinking this way. Might not other organizations just usurp us if we do this? What’s to stop someone else just stepping in and re-selling all of our data?

Forkability and persistence, for sure. But why not foreclose some of the nightmare scenarios with non-commercial licensing? Eve lists NC licenses as among the ways that an organization might skirt POSI principles without fulfilling their spirit:

Likewise, you might comply with the spirit of POSI by licensing your data openly, but under conditions that limit who could ever resurrect the project (e.g. CC-BY-ND, CC-BY-NC, or, even, CC-BY-SA – even though I am usually a fan of ShareAlike licenses).

I respectfully disagree. Indeed, a major flaw in the POSI principles is that they don’t make an explicit call-out to nonprofit status. Scholarly infrastructure shouldn’t just be open, but nonprofit too. The alternative is capture-by-acquisition.¹

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 on a trend of year-on-year growth within the region, since our first deal with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, signed in 2018. […]The number of deals has grown rapidly within the region every year, with 2023 seeing 28 new deals in the region, including our first agreements with partners in Canada and Mexico.

I wonder if MIT would sign such a deal today, given MIT Libraries’ public distancing from such deals:

At MIT, we have innovated and experimented in open access models for many years. Our experience has led us to become increasingly concerned about the implications of per-article payment models that serve as the basis for the UC–Elsevier and other [read and publish] agreements. Locking in a norm where an author, funder, and/or institution must pay an opaque and often costly fee for the right to publish an article risks locking out scholars from less privileged institutions and less well funded disciplines. Equitable opportunity to contribute to scholarly literature is as important for the integrity and usefulness of scholarship as is the open accessibility to read.

MIT Libraries is a leader among the Ivy Plus institutions, who recently took a similar stand against APCs in general, and transformative/read-and-publish deals in particular.

As the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA) put it in its own recent statement,

So-called “Big Deals” – “read and publish agreements” between (consortia of) research libraries, institutions, and universities on the one hand, and scientific publishers on the other – have further exacerbated these inequities and contributed to the consolidation of the already dominant market position of the major commercial publishers.

The Royal Society of Chemistry calls its transformative agreements “an essential stepping stone.” But they’re actually stepping backward.

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 APC-funded model of OA publishing is to out publish everyone else to scale your operations to publish research faster and more furiously than others. Basically, to win market share — the more you publish, the more you earn. As a not-for-profit publisher, we don’t have that commercial imperative, but for other reasons, we have had a glimpse into what this type of publishing looks like and have been burnt by it.

The Society had flipped one of their journals to APC-based OA, back in 2012. By 2019, they were having doubts:

> The wholesale move to an author-pays model didn’t stand up to the Society’s collective view that the ‘ability to publish should not be linked with an individual researcher’s ability to pay.’ Article publishing charge-based open access models that removed the barrier to reading replaced it with a new barrier to publishing and therefore ran contrary to prevailing views.

That year, and into 2020, the Society was targeted by bad actors:

> And then our sound science, APC-funded journal became our achilles heel. We were an early target of papermill activity, and just as this blight hit us several years ago, it has now spread sector wide.

The [whole interview](https://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/cultivating-sustainable-in-house-publishing-pt2/) is worth reading.

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 [betrayal-cum-sale](https://www.chronicle.com/article/mit-and-harvard-have-sold-higher-educations-future) of edX to for-profit OPM provider 2U:

> As [Smith] shared with me, the center has identified three broad areas of focus: digital technology, innovation and research, and expanding access to high-quality learning experiences. That doesn’t seem to narrow things down very much. […] She and the board are trying to get a handle on which organizations out there are already doing what, and, as she put it, “understanding where we add value.” That process involves talking with a range of organizations and individuals about “the challenges that perpetuate inequalities.”The center’s first online-learning projects could begin as soon as this winter. But I’m not expecting any proclamation of a grand, detailed 10-year strategy. Smith made clear that the center sees itself as “a learning organization” that could shift goals as new priorities surface.

That’s some impressive progress, two years since the sale. Meanwhile, Elsevier [announced last week](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/osmosis-from-elsevier-joins-global-edx-partner-network-to-expand-access-to-education-for-aspiring-healthcare-professionals-301896396.html) that its [Osmosis](https://www.osmosis.org) health education platform is joining the “global edX partner network.” edX/2U will host Elsevier’s Professional Certificate program in Healthcare Foundations.

So the post-sale edX successor is [talking to folks](https://www.chronicle.com/newsletter/the-edge/2022-07-27) about “challenges that perpetuate inequalities.” Here’s something for that list: higher-ed privatization via Elsevier.

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 surprise, but the perverse dynamic is another reason that Plan S’s announcement to end support for such deals after 2024 can’t come soon enough.

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 only beneficial for public interest research—it also has enormous commercial value. Scraping is the bread and butter of the “social listening” industry, which collects and analyses social media data on behalf of companies who want to find out what people think of their brand and keep tabs on trends that might impact their business. Multimillion-dollar companies like Brandwatch and Meltwater use a variety of methods to collect this data, including web scraping, and sell access to their data tools though subscriptions that cost thousands of dollars per month. Yet while researchers are routinely served cease-and-desist letters for the same practices, social listening companies are considered trusted partners of social media companies.

As the author—researcher Brandi Geurnik—notes, firms like Facebook often weaponize privacy to shut down scholars’ access. Now the machine-learning boom is leading sites to aggressively monetize API access—pricing researchers out.