Twitter has rightly blown up over Taylor & Francis's appalling "Accelerated Publication" grift:

If time is critical in your publishing strategy, our Accelerated Publication options are available on a select number of biomedical journals and can help you get your research into a high-quality, peer-reviewed journal, fast.

With Accelerated Publication, you can:

coordinate your publishing schedule with conferences, drug approvals, and drug launches

keep competitive advantage by getting your discoveries to market quickly

speed up the peer review process without sacrificing quality or rigor

$7000 dollars to publish in 3-5 weeks.

From a new Penn State [study](https://edarxiv.org/py3sz/) on online program management (OPMs) deals:

> OPM contracts are—to be blunt—one strategy for extracting profit from a mostly nonprofit educational model. And, also bluntly, they are a way of doing so without attracting the level of regulatory scrutiny that is connected to the actual provision of for-profit higher education. […] Several firms we analyzed have legacy connections to for-profit higher education, and most are attracting venture capital investments (and a few initiating initial public offerings), which suggests confidence in the profitability and returns on investment that these vehicles provide.

The [report](https://edarxiv.org/py3sz/) (available on [EdArXiv](https://edarxiv.org/py3sz/)) is well-worth reading, though its policy recommendations are mostly defensive:

> If regulation for outsourcing online program management moves too quickly and without caution, the outcome could decimate many colleges and universities by drying up their ability to outsource with for-profit companies—or, worse still, create large-scale issues for students when online programs cannot function internally within the institution offering the program.

But the point isn't to preserve the OPM industry. The point instead is to keep higher-ed mission-aligned and nonprofit—to protect students and universities from windfall-extracting profiteers.

Rebecca Bryant, Charles Watkinson, and Rebecca Welzenbach, writing for the Scholarly Kitchen on a science-humanities gap in metadata retrieval:

The ability to harvest accurate and mostly complete metadata for researchers in STEM disciplines is quite good in all of these examples. However, metadata harvesting from any of these sources provides disappointing results for humanities and some social science scholars.  When we look at a researcher’s profile, we may notice that a book (or more than one) is missing.

They're writing about the brave new world of RIM. Short for "Research Information Management," RIM software is mainly used by universities and other research entities to measure and predict scholars' productivity.

Point taken: The humanities, and social science book disciplines too, have some metadata problems. But I'm not sure we want to oil the metric gears, given the way that quantified measures of "impact" have distorted scholars' truth-seeking commitments for decades. Worse still is the fact that the major players in the RIM market are Elsevier (Pure) and Springer Nature parent Holtzbrinck (Elements). In both cases, the publishing oligopolists are harvesting academics' behavior and re-selling them as prediction products—on top of their windfall subscription-and-APC profits.

Yes, metadata resiliency is a good thing. But let's not inadvertently build the road to surveillance publishing.

Brilliant paper by Alexander Gross and Björn Brembs, last revised in July:

The affordability problem of scholarly publishing, i.e., the supra-inflationary price increases with stagnating library budgets, has been a hot topic for more than three decades. In recent years, […] the average cost of an article has emerged as a useful measure with which to compare different business models. However, most authors refer to the prices charged by the publisher, not the actual cost to the publisher. One consequence of this mis-attribution is a potential overestimation of the actual costs of scholarly publishing due to the inclusion of the business models and pricing strategies of publishers into the calculation. To close this gap, here we provide a bottom-up calculation of the cost of efforts and services which are required to achieve a certain service level in order to publish an academic journal article.

Gross and Brembs' estimate of cost per article? Something like $200 to $1000, depending on the journal set-up, with the cost for a "representative scholarly article" at about $400. That's roughly a tenth of the commercial publishers' typical APC.

From a March press release announcing the "EnableOA" publishing platform:

The Amnet and Coko Foundation partnership has paved the way for EnableOA: an open access publishing platform for the scholarly community. It is a comprehensive framework with a slew of modular and smart features that allow customization of the platform to best suit the publishing requirements of a user. The platform is designed to reduce publishing cost and time while supporting greater collaboration, research and development integrity, distribution, and transparency.

I hadn't heard of Amnet before. It's a buzzword-heavy, India-based contract publisher, specializing in "Smartshoring®": "a smart balance between onshore and offshore resources enriched with strategic global partnerships across multiple geographies." The company—which is part of a larger holding group—is clearly moving into scholarly publishing, with the EnableOA journal and book platforms.

The weird thing is that the platforms are built on two core Coko softwares: Kotahi (journals) and Editoria (books). Coko, of course, is short for Collaborative Knowledge Foundation, run by energetic coder-entrepreneur Adam Hyde.

Hyde and Coko are fixtures in the nonprofit scholarly publishing world. They have a major hand in the Open Publishing Awards and Open Publishing Fest, for example. And yet there's been an apparent shift in focus at Coko. One way to capture this is by homepage tagline. Up through 2019:

Transforming Knowledge Creation and Sharing

The Coko Foundation is a non-profit organization transforming how knowledge is created, improved, and shared. Our goal – to build community-owned solutions in open science, open research, and open education.

More recently:

We build, you publish.

We use open-source technology to build the best publishing tools in the business. Whether you’re looking to extend an existing platform or build something new, we can help you build better, in less time and for less money.

That's a pretty big change. And so is for-profit Indian outsourcing.

Jeffrey R. Young, writing for EdSurge:

A new startup wants to shake up the textbook market by making it easier for professors to adopt courseware created at colleges and universities rather than by commercial textbook publishers. It’s solution: Create a new marketplace where instructors can find them. A key premise of the Lexington, Mass.-based company, called Argos Education, is that the way textbooks are created and revised is due for a reset. Namely, it wants to help build an open-source system that lets professors piece together online course materials from a variety of sources, and also offer their own materials for sale to colleagues around the world.

The idea for a mix-and-match courseware marketplace is a great one, but holy hell—why was the initiative organized as a for-profit company? The underlying Sojourner platform, to be built from a planned Carnegie Mellon/Arizona State integration of two existing softwares, will be open source.

But Argos, the marketplace vendor, is a profit-seeker. As countless mission-aligned, mom-and-pop ventures in scholarly publishing have already shown, Argos will be—if, and as soon as, it is successful—a sitting duck for big-publisher acquisition. The EdSurge article inadvertently makes the point: The Arizona State team working on Sojourner had built a commercial platform, Smart Sparrow, which it sold to … Pearson in 2020.