Alberto Pepe, Matteo Cantiello, and Josh Nicholson, in their arXiv paper calling on arXiv to overhaul itself:

Disclaimer: This article has originally been written and posted on Authorea, a collaborative online platform for technical and data-driven documents. Authorea is being developed to respond to some of the concerns with current methodology raised in this very piece, and as such is suggested as a possible future alternative to existing preprint servers.

The paper doesn't mention that Authorea is owned by Atypon, which itself is a subsidiary of publishing oligopolist Wiley. All three authors are affiliated with the Wiley-owned platform.

Which begs the question: will the arXiv of the future be nonprofit?

Update: The paper was originally published in 2017, before Authorea was acquired by Wiley. A webpage version was posted to arXiv’s experimental html5 renderer with a 2022 time stamp, which confused me and many others across Twitter about its pub date.

The Knowledge Futures Group's Gabe Stein, writing about the head-scratching hurdles faced by KFG in its effort to secure financial support from libraries:

If we were selling to for-profit corporations we’d mostly be able say “enter your credit card info here” and that would be that. If we were a for-profit corporation ourselves, the interface would be at least a little bit simpler because we’d be able to say “you pay us for these exact services, which we take away if you don’t continue to pay us” […] But being a mission-driven nonprofit with values that align with universities has, ironically, made it much, much harder to be supported by those universities.

At mediastudies.press we face this problem too. Library and university procurement policies make it hard for even well-meaning librarians to commit direct support to publishers. There's some serious madness here. Libraries are choking on the oligoplolists' subscription and APC costs. They're generally sympathetic to the community-led, nonprofit alternative. There are plenty of other obstacles in shifting dollars to the KFG's of the world; red tape and we've-always-done-it-this-way inertia shouldn't be one of them.

David Beer, in his love letter to the academic book review:

Rather than being at the centre of disciplines, they are seen to be something of a luxury: an indulgent misuse of time spent reading, cover to cover, and then writing something that does not have any measurable value. As a result, the practice of writing a book review is often, and understandably, seen as an indulgence too far; a waste of precious time; a distraction from the proper activity of making original contributions to knowledge; an inefficiency perhaps.

Beer acknowledges all the metric-tide pressures that make reviews hard to fit in. But, he continues,

if these pressures mean that we abandon the book review, then we might well be damaging the foundations from which knowledge emerges and the community building properties of the debate that they afford.

It's a great post. Beer ends up describing writing a book review as "very minor form of resistance":

a space that we use to put a notion of collective knowledge ahead of the pressure for individualised contributions. The book review presents us with an opportunity to show that we value the things that might otherwise be lost in the logic of the systems that govern our research. We may even find that by defending the book review, the other aspects of our work might be enriched anyway.

ResearchProfessional News:

UK universities are close to sealing an open-access deal with the academic publisher Elsevier, following protracted negotiations on the replacement of the UK’s largest subscription agreement. On 24 February, a spokesperson for the higher education IT firm Jisc confirmed that the sector had accepted a proposal from Elsevier “which meets their core requirements”. “Contract negotiations are currently ongoing, before a deal is finalised,” they said. 

One step forward, one step back.

Helen Dobson, writing for Jisc's blog on the UK consortium's new diamond OA funding scheme:

Jisc will publish a call directed to mission-based and diamond publishers to submit an application providing detailed information about their journal/initiative and an annual UK HE funding target by a submission deadline date.
Jisc will then check submissions against sector quality standards and will work with approved publishers to arrive at institutional contribution levels […]
We’ll announce participants in late April and open catalogue pages in [in] Jisc’s ordering system, so that members can see details of funding options and pledge support.

It's such happy news: Jisc's Open Acess Community Framework (OACF) is the latest iteration of the mission-aligned funding exchange—the direct-funding alternative to the APC and read-and-publish.

The Guardian:

Scientists working with one of the world’s largest climate research publishers say they’re increasingly alarmed that the company works with the fossil fuel industry to help increase oil and gas drilling, the Guardian can reveal.

For more than a decade, [Elsevier] has supported the energy industry’s efforts to optimize oil and gas extraction. It commissions authors, editors and journal advisory board members who are employees at top oil firms. Elsevier also markets some of its research portals and data services directly to the oil and gas industry to help “increase the odds of exploration success”.

Let me count the ways…