Preprint platform Research Square exists to drive business to English-language editing factory American Journal Experts (AJE), which launched the platform in 2018. Preprint authors receive a Language Quality Score, and are then shilled to spend hundreds of dollars on AJE services:

What does my Language Quality Score mean? AJE used machine learning to develop a tool that assesses your language quality. The model was trained using more than 100,000 academic papers in all areas of study that had been scored by professional editors based on the quality of English. Your Language Quality Score reflects how the quality of English in your paper compares to the other papers in our dataset. Scores take into account all aspects of readability in English, including grammar, consistency, and clarity.

This is grim stuff: leveraging English-language hegemony to squeeze Global South scholars, by way of preprinting's corporate capture. Why not throw in some bullshitty machine-learning claims?

Exactly no one should be surprised that Springer Nature acquired a majority stake in Research Square/AJE in 2018, the year the preprint platform launched. In a Scholarly Kitchen interview in 2020, Springer Nature's Eugenie Regan cited the company's ambition to transition its business from "content centric" to "service centric":

Our vision is for researchers to be supported throughout both their publishing journey and careers, able to seamlessly access the right information, tools and services at exactly the point at which they need it; to help authors get published and create a level playing field for researchers around the world.

At many of its journals, Springer Nature now prompts authors to opt in to Research Square preprinting ("Journal-integrated preprint sharing from Springer Nature and Research Square"). No word about the English-language upsell, nor Springer's majority stake, on the service's about page.

Michael Vasquez, writing for The Chronicle [paywalled] a few weeks ago:

When a pair of professors stepped down from their posts at Arcadia University this year, without another job lined up, they did so to halt the creation of a physician-assistant program in partnership with 2U, the online-learning giant. […] After the full-time faculty members left, the program director also stepped down — further dampening any hopes of launching the program soon, as a program director must be on the job for 15 months before any accreditor visit. The resignations came several months after the accreditor’s virtual site visit to evaluate Arcadia’s fledgling hybrid physician-assistant program. That virtual visit did not go well.

If and when the delayed, staff-less program gets launched, 2U will receive 62.5% of tuition revenue for 15 years, The Chronicle
reported.

Online Program Managers (OPMs) like 2U are stealth privatizers of nonprofit higher ed, even as they drain dollars from our universities and students. The Government Accountability Office's mild-mannered May report [pdf] calling on more oversight was followed, earlier this month, by a hard-hitting Wall Street Journal piece ("2U Inc. isn't a university, but it sometimes looks like one"), so maybe scrutiny of the sleazy sector is picking up. Just in time for 2U's likely sale to an Indian ed-tech giant.

What looks worse than ever is Harvard and MIT's shameless decision last year to sell edX.

Speaking of the Knowledge Futures Group's Gabe Stein, here's the key excerpt from his recent post outlining the KFG's plans for PubPub self-hosting:

We’re planning to support both centralized and self-hosted versions within our existing nonprofit by slowly building our new membership and community services offerings, as described in our sustainability update earlier this year. Our goal is to become deeply sustainable. Not just enough to keep the lights on, but enough to pay fair salaries and offer great benefits to our employees, to continue developing innovative features, and to build a robust rainy day fund. Unfortunately, some people in the ecosystem don’t like this approach. They see it as a false choice, and believe that focusing on making our core use-case sustainable compromises on openness. We respectfully disagree. Learning from the legions of projects that have either pivoted to serve the needs of well-funded incumbents, or simply failed when their funding ran out, we believe we are on the right path to sustainably meet the needs of an underserved set of users while maintaining our commitment to being as open as possible.

I'm right with Stein and the Knowledge Futures Group on the self-hosting question. One reason my own publishing projects have gone all in on PubPub is that they've made sustainability a top priority—with an ability-to-pay ethos and full-feature access for those who can't afford memberships. PubPub's key virtue, arguably, is its turnkey ease of setup, which—yes—rests on the team prioritizing the hosted version over self-hosting support. I'm glad that the PubPub team has medium-term plans to support self-hosting, but I'm relieved—more so, actually—to hear that they'll continue to prioritize the central PubPub instance.

The Knowledge Futures Group's Gabe Stein, in a sharp analysis of the peculiar market dynamics of scholarly publishing:

Because of this complexity, the academic publishing market imposes enormous social switching costs on its customers. For an individual researcher to change their behavior, they need to know that the university or lab which pays their salary, the funder which pays their research costs, and the library which pays for access to their field's top journals won't penalize them for it — or, in the best case, that they’ll be rewarded for it.

It's true that there's enormous inertia—resistance to experimentation—that props up the current publishing system. But Stein's framing in terms of "social switching costs" hitched to a researcher's three constituents (the university, funder, and library), while insightful, risks obscuring two facets of the problem. The first is that it's really one of those constituents, the university, that imposes the switching cost, by way of the tenure, promotion, and hiring systems. The second missing piece here is the role of researchers' own beliefs: Many scholars have internalized the journal prestige economy. It's not merely a complex opportunity structure or the friction of too many moving parts. The bigger issue is that (1) scholars want to get published in Nature, which (2) universities reward in formal and informal ways, often (3) drawing on other scholars who serve every step of the tenure, promotion, and hiring processes. The problem of journal prestige lock-in, in other words, has a lot to do with belief and culture. We’ve met the enemy, and it’s us. One implication is that culture change, and efforts to overhaul tenure-and-promotion and hiring criteria, are where a lot of our attention should be.

Echoing some of the other feedback on Stein's piece, I found the initial framing around for-profit startups and private research labs a bit jarring. In my view, profit-seeking and the university system are fundamentally misaligned. A more practical issue is incumbent acquisition. Many of the would-be disrupters that Stein mentions met their maker as new members of the Elsevier or Wiley families—one of a handful of desired “exits” for the VC firms that backed them. The main task (admittedly a long reach) is to restore the scholarly publishing infrastructure to the mission-aligned, nonprofit sector—which is one reason Stein's Knowledge Futures Group is so indispensable. Stein agrees, I think, and the main thrust of the piece is that the next round of starry-eyed entrepreneurs will probably join their forebears in the startup graveyard. I look forward to the day when we find concepts like “total addressable market” (TAM) unseemly when applied to spheres, like education and medicine, oriented to the public good rather than private gain.

Stanford's Robert Kaplan, arguing in [*Times Higher Education*](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/lets-end-rocky-marriage-between-academia-and-commercial-publishers) for bringing academic publishing in-house [paywalled, alas], cites the author-excluding APC:

> academics often can’t afford those high open access fees – especially faculty outside the sciences, the wealthier institutions and the developed world. This makes it more likely that journals will fill their pages with papers by authors who have money, as opposed to authors who have good ideas. Pay to play is simply the wrong model for academia.

Kaplan's [right](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/lets-end-rocky-marriage-between-academia-and-commercial-publishers) that the current joint-custody arrangement—non-profit universities and commercial publishers—is odd, exploitative, and ripe for reversal. The article is understandably [light on details](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/lets-end-rocky-marriage-between-academia-and-commercial-publishers), but one promising avenue—with some real momentum—is to link up the existing, nonprofit repository infrastructure with a post-then-review publication model. In Björn Brembs' [variation on the idea](https://www.jeffpooley.com/2022/06/replacing-academic-journals/), publishing services like copy editing would be provided on a procurement basis.

A full divorce between academia and commercial publishers sounds utopian, for sure, but it's worth imagining, in various schemes like Kaplan's or Brembs', if only to chip away at the sense of inevitability.

Iowa State's Curtis Brandy, in an [interview](https://ceup.openingthefuture.net/news/52/) on the [Opening the Future](https://www.openingthefuture.net) site:

> Libraries have traditionally placed their scholarly communications and collections work in distinct organizational silos. This has meant, in many cases, that the values that inform a library’s work in scholarly communications do not actually inform the work done in collections. […] At Iowa State, we have just adopted a [new collection and open strategies policy](https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/entities/publication/b0aeade3-3dec-4d9f-84d6-aacbd140f157) that centers our library’s values in our collection work. […] Aligning our scholarly communications work and values with collections helps a library to shift this spending from traditional collection procurement to open investing, which will help incentivize and support the transition to a more equitable scholarly publishing system.

This is indeed the rub: The scholarly comms librarian or office, in most U.S. libraries, is nowhere near the collections budget. The Iowa State [policy](https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/entities/publication/b0aeade3-3dec-4d9f-84d6-aacbd140f157) is a promising first step, but what about a complete merger of the roles—so that scholarly communications and collections are served by the same, unified staff?