From the Open Library of humanities blog:

We are delighted to announce that the Open Library of Humanities is now open to expressions of interest from subscription journals in the humanities seeking to move to a gold open access (OA) publishing model without author-facing charges (‘diamond’ OA).

The journal-flipping posters are the best part.

I have a new working paper, ["Surveillance Publishing,"](https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/j6ung/) up on SocArXiv:

> In place of Google’s propensity to buy, Clarivate is selling bets on future scholarly productivity and impact, among other academic prediction products. This essay lingers on a prediction too: Clarivate’s business model is coming for scholarly publishing. Google is one peer, but the company’s real competitors are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor& Francis, and SAGE. Elsevier, in particular, has been moving into predictive analytics for years now. Of course the publishing giants have long profited off of academics and our university employers—by packaging scholars’ unpaid writing-and-editing labor only to sell it back to us as usuriously priced subscriptions or APCs. That’s a lucrative business that Elsevier and the others won’t give up. But they’re layering another business on top of their legacy publishing operations, in the Clarivate mold.

From the MIT press release:

[Direct to Open] moves professional and scholarly books from a solely market-based, purchase model, where individuals and libraries buy single eBooks, to a collaborative, library-supported open access model. Instead of purchasing a title once for a single collection, libraries now have the opportunity to fund them one time for the world through participant fees. To date, over 160 libraries and consortia from across the globe have committed to support the D2O initiative,

A prominent proof of concept.

Dorothea Salo, in a delightly feisty OA chapter on preservation of digital humanists' work and evidence:

Most institutions investing anything at all in the digital humanities have only one to a mere handful of digital humanists on the faculty. These paltry few face the Sisyphean task of successfully persuading their library, campus IT organization, and campus administrators to allocate significant money and staff toward digital preservation. Such an appeal typically only happens in the first place if digital humanists are already lucky enough to have access to basic computing and support, which is often not the case.

It gets worse:

Digital humanists find themselves countered, not to say opposed, in their efforts to secure support and funding by a much greater number of faculty humanists not identifying with the digital humanities, who think of libraries only as print-book purveyors and believe products of digital culture barely or not at all worth preserving, parallel to historic reactions to the advent in the West of printed codices (as opposed to scribed manuscripts), photography, film, television, and comics/graphic novels.

Burn!

It's a great chapter, among many others in Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray's OA book Reassembling Scholarly Communications.

Jorrit Smit and Lauren Hessels, writing for the LSE Impact blog on the "performativity of evaluation":

… the way in which specific evaluation methods assume, and thereby produce, different understandings of research and impact. In a recent paper (open access) we explore this very question, building on previous constructivist studies that have proposed how evaluation significantly shapes the contours of the object it valuates.

It's a smart point, that we humans change in reaction to ostensibly descriptive measures. But that fact might call into question the practice of assessment itself, especially in light of Goodhart's law.

Jeffrey Young writing for EdSurge:

Facebook (er, I guess now Meta) announced that it would partner with Coursera and edX to help push Meta’s curriculum in augmented and virtual reality, which it calls the Spark AR Curriculum. A spokesperson for edX, which started as a nonprofit by Harvard and MIT but is in the process of being sold to for-profit 2U, said the group would share more information about the partnership and its broader shifts in the coming weeks.

So it comes to this: Harvard and MIT sell off nonprofit edX, which pivots to Facebook.