Demmy Verbeke and Laura Mesotten, writing in UKSG Insights on the KU Leuven Fund for Fair OA:

The current push for OA risks putting so much strain on library budgets that there is no money left to foster alternative approaches to scholarly communication beyond the for-profit solutions offered by a handful of big technology companies. This should not deter research libraries from investing in OA, but rather incentivize them to prioritize non-profit, community-led approaches which are better aligned with scholarly values. One possible way to do this is to create a discrete fund specifically focused on financing these alternatives, which has a number of advantages concerning visibility, speed of decision-taking, administration and budget control. The Fund for Fair OA managed by KU Leuven Libraries is an example of such a fund, solely spent on OA books published by a university press and other non-profit initiatives in the field of open scholarship (particularly when funded through library membership programmes).

More like this, please.

The article describes KU Leuven's thinking behind the Fund's decision to drop APC support, even for nonprofit publications. The issues were mainly logistical: It was a messy hassle. The upshot, though, is that the Fund, since 2021, has turned off what was already a slow-flowing APC spigot.

Chris Hartgerink, writing about the new, modular publishing platform ResearchEquals.com, which launched today:

We need to work to keep open access accessible to the Global Majority. We join the efforts for new business models to that end. Recent innovations such as Subscribe to Open, Direct to Open, and Read & Let Read are necessary parts of that evolution. Pay to close is our contribution. We're creating and testing out how viable this new financing model is for Open Access.

Hartgerink is founder and director of liberate science, the entity behind ResearchEquals. The organization appears to be a nonprofit consulting firm—though there's no easy-to-find statement about the group's legal status.

Looking forward to kicking the new platform's tires, especially since the pay-to-close idea (akin to Github's private repositories) is intriguing. The idea is that you pay a fee to publish anything but CC BY—a charge that escalates as your license gets more restrictive, all the way to €550 for a closed license. My first gripe (it's more than a quibble) is that a CC BY-NC is €200, reflecting a broader CC BY fetishism in the open science world. CC BY-NC, for principled and practical reasons both, should be a first-class citizen. In the ResearchEquals case, that should mean free to publish.

From the SPARC Open Access Working Group's statement endorsing the recently ratified UNESCO Open Science recommendation:

The utility of the Recommendation hinges on its uptake by the global community. To this end, we strongly encourage the United States to adopt the Open Science Recommendation in its entirety and work closely with stakeholders to implement it. 

The statement calls out what is among the most important principles in UNESCO's Recommendation: community-owned infrastructure.

Perhaps in deference to the Open Access Working Group's diverse membership, the UNESCO document's anti-APC stance goes unmentioned, nor does it appear in the International Alliance of Research Library Association endorsement statement. Here's the relevant UNESCO passage:

Ensuring diversity in scholarly communications with adherence to the principles of open, transparent and equitable access and supporting non-commercial publishing models and collaborative publishing models with no article processing charges or book processing charges.

Jeroen Sondervan, in an Open Access Books Network (OABN) post:

Under the banner and with the support of the Open Access Books Network, I organized the series ‘OA Books Workouts’, which were five talks (45 minutes) with humanities scholars from different disciplines (e.g. history, media and innovation studies) about their research and book project. All of them, in their own way, have experimented with innovative ways of openly writing and publishing. 
[…]
You don’t often hear about the experiences of scholars who dared to go off the beaten track, or scholars who are intrinsically motivated to opt for open working methods and access, which often also serves a very specific purpose that benefits their research. That is precisely why I wanted to start the OA Books Workouts series, so others can hear about and learn from these open research and publishing practices, with the aim of enabling others to do the same. 

The full post—which includes links to the recorded presentations—is worth reading. It was a pleasure to take part in the series.

From the author bio of Mirela Roncevic's Commonplace article on European librarians' views on OA monographs:

Mirela Roncevic is a doctoral candidate at the University of Zagreb, where she has studied information and communication science, with a special focus on Open Access, open science, and open virtual libraries. She is Managing Director of No Shelf Required, a well-known web site which has followed the development of e-books and digital content in libraries since 2007.

The article reports on Roncevic's doctoral research:

The study focused exclusively on monographs (not journals) and on collaborative business models referred to as crowdfunding or cross-institutional global initiatives. Examples of such initiatives include (but are not limited to) Knowledge Unlatched, Unglue.it, and Reveal Digital. 

The Commonplace piece has some interesting findings. European librarians, for instance, don't seem hellbent on seeing "local benefit" to justify spending on OA-monograph schemes. But there's also a troubling omission in the article: Roncevic's employment at stealth for-profit Knowledge Unlatched goes unmentioned.

Roncevic's April 2021 piece appeared months before Wiley acquired Knowledge Unlatched—which had the virtue of removing the sheep's clothing. Then as now, the Commonplace's readers deserve disclosure of such ties.

I missed this important Brookings report from September:

Hundreds of higher education institutions are procuring algorithms that strategically allocate scholarships to convince more students to enroll. In doing so, these enrollment management algorithms help colleges vary the cost of attendance to students’ willingness to pay, a crucial aspect of competition in the higher education market. This paper elaborates on the specific two-stage process by which these algorithms first predict how likely prospective students are to enroll, and second help decide how to disburse scholarships to convince more of those prospective students to attend the college.

The report recommends that universities stop using the algorithms to assess likelihood to enroll or to mete out aid:

The stated goal of enrollment optimization algorithms is to incentivize enrollment at the precise maximum tuition (or minimum scholarship) an applicant is willing to pay to attend that college. Vendors unanimously market their enrollment management software in this way—saying they intend to allocate the “minimum amount of aid necessary to meet and exceed your [enrollment] goals.”