From the draft UNESCO open science recommendations:

Considering science as a global public good, open science services should be viewed as essential research infrastructures, governed and owned by the community and funded collectively by governments, funders and institutions reflecting the diverse interests and needs of the research community and society. Member States are encouragea to promote non-commercial open science infrastructures …

The document also takes a strong stand against the APC, endorsing

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.

If adopted in November, the UNESCO principles—even as recommendations—could be crucial in the fight against the closed-authorship policies of Plan S and the commercial publishers.

The Budapest Open Access Initiative is almost 20:

The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) - the first international open access declaration - will celebrate its 20th anniversary on 14 February 2022. In preparation, the BOAI2020 steering committee is working on a new set of recommendations, based on BOAI principles, current circumstances, and input from colleagues in all academic fields and regions of the world. 

The new steering committee is soliciting comments by email.

Here's the note that I sent along:

With apologies for not specifying a single question, or answering them all, I have a proposal for your new set of recommendations: That you take a strong stand against APCs and the read-and-publish deals that perpetuate them, on the grounds that barriers to readers should not be dropped only to raise them for authors.

The original BOAI included a fateful boolean:

"There are many alternative sources of funds for this purpose, including the foundations and governments that fund research, the universities and laboratories that employ researchers, endowments set up by discipline or institution, friends of the cause of open access, profits from the sale of add-ons to the basic texts, funds freed up by the demise or cancellation of journals charging traditional subscription or access fees, or even contributions from the researchers themselves."

The clause—"or even contributions from researchers themselves"—may have emboldened the adoption of the APC. The first OA author charge, from BioMed Central, was announced just a month after the Budapest gathering. The high-profile nonprofit Public Library of Science (PLOS) embraced the APC model on its 2003 launch. What began, with BioMed, as a $500 charge, became with PLOS a $1500 fee, and then on (with Springer's 2004 uptake) the $3,000 to $5,000 we know so well.

Outside the grant-funded natural sciences and scholars at handful of rich North American universities and European countries, the fees are utterly unaffordable. The creaky and patronizing waiver system covers a tiny fraction of this blocked-access population—the vast majority of the world's scholars.

BOAI, in its 20th anniversary slate of recommendations, should endorse collective funding—direct support from funders to publishers—so that authors, and not just readers, are included in the promise of open access that Budapest announced to the world twenty years ago.

From an Inside Higher Ed story on a pair of new reports measuring the program-specific "return on investment" at U.S. colleges and universities:

Among those earning bachelor’s degrees, the Third Way report found that 100 percent of nursing and engineering students took five years or less to recoup their educational investments, compared to 44 percent in anthropology programs and 45 percent in religious studies.

Though it's been the driving frame for 40-odd years now, ROI thinking—that what a college degree is for is always and obviously to maximize lifetime earnings—has reached second-nature status. Stories like this one don't even bother to include a dissenting voice.

*Inside Higher Ed*, on the [latest blockbuster merger in for-profit higher-ed](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/09/14/blackboard-merge-anthology-creating-massive-ed-tech-company):

> Anthology, which emerged a year ago from the combination of three higher education administrative software firms, will merge with Blackboard, long the most visible company in learning technology, the two companies [announced today](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/anthology-and-blackboard-to-merge-creating-a-leading-global-provider-of-education-software-and-solutions-301375174.html). The deal will result in the end of Blackboard as a freestanding company, and could bring the end of its well-known, and sometimes controversial, brand. The companies did not share any financial data, but the combined entity is likely to be among the sector's biggest educational technology firms. Blackboard's current owner, Providence Equity Partners, bought it in 2011 for $1.64 billion, and Blackboard was shopped (but not sold) in 2015 for about $3 billion.

The [details](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/anthology-and-blackboard-to-merge-creating-a-leading-global-provider-of-education-software-and-solutions-301375174.html) are sketchy, but it sure looks like data analytics is the combined company's future:

> Milton [the Anthology CEO] and Bill Ballhaus, Blackboard's chairman, CEO and president, said the power of the combined company will flow from its ability to bring data from across the student life cycle to bear on student and institutional performance. "We're on the cusp of breaking down the data siloes" that often exist between administrative and academic departments on campuses, Ballhaus said.

That sounds ominous.

From a [press release](https://emeritus.org/newsroom/emeritus-supercharges-mission-to-make-high-quality-education-affordable-and-accessible-through-650-million-capital-raise-led-by-accel-and-softbank-vision-fund-2/) announcing a $650 investment by Accel and Softbank in Indian higher-ed company [Emeritus](https://emeritus.org):

> In the last 12 months, Emeritus has grown rapidly around the globe with more than 100% year-on-year growth. The company is on track to realize more than $500 million in bookings this year, making it the fastest growing ed-tech skilling platform. Nearly two-thirds of its paid learner base is located outside the United States, with the company growing more than three times annually in emerging markets.

Based on the [funding round](https://emeritus.org/newsroom/emeritus-supercharges-mission-to-make-high-quality-education-affordable-and-accessible-through-650-million-capital-raise-led-by-accel-and-softbank-vision-fund-2/), Emeritus is now valued at $3.2 billion—which bests 2U's $2.6 and more than half of Coursera's $5.1, two higher-ed for-profits with far more media coverage.

When it's not announcing huge VC deals, the company is bathed in mission rhetoric, even more than its U.S.-based competitors—complete with a .org [domain name](https://emeritus.org/) and a [previous "investment" from Mark Zuckerberg's quasi-charity](https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/31/chan-zuckerberg-initiative-backs-indian-education-startup-eruditus-in-113-million-fundraise/). Like Coursera and 2U, Emeritus [touts its partnerships](https://emeritus.org) with prestigious universities, including MIT, Columbia, Dartmouth, Penn, and Northwestern.

Emeritus and its [Eruditus Group parent](https://www.eruditus.com/about-us/) deserve much more scrutiny from those of us committed to a nonprofit higher-ed future.

Jon Treadway and Sarah Greaves, in their August [Scholarly Kitchen post](https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/08/03/guest-post-one-publisher-to-rule-them-all-consolidation-trends-in-the-scholarly-communications-and-research-sectors/) predicting more consolidation in scholarly publishing, doubt that scholarly societies will leave their commercial partners:

> [I]nitiatives like Plan S are having the reverse effect, magnifying the importance of the scale and expertise offered by large commercial publishers. For smaller publishers, they provide reassurance, scale, and tools to comply with Plan S and other funding initiatives that they alone will find hard to implement after years of reducing internal editorial and publishing offices. 

It's a [depressing read](https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/08/03/guest-post-one-publisher-to-rule-them-all-consolidation-trends-in-the-scholarly-communications-and-research-sectors/), partly owing to the authors' pose as industry analysts. The [piece](https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/08/03/guest-post-one-publisher-to-rule-them-all-consolidation-trends-in-the-scholarly-communications-and-research-sectors/)—definitely worth reading—comes off as market advice to would-be investors.