Thaiane Moreira de Oliveira, together with nine Latin American co-authors, in an [important rejoinder](https://academic.oup.com/joc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/joc/jqab025/6359522) to an [open science (OS) manifesto](https://academic.oup.com/joc/article/71/1/1/5803422) penned by 37 communication scholars, mostly North American and European:

> The administrative approach, in general, focuses on the homogenization of scientific practices, aligning science and platform capitalism. As a result, it increases the penetration of infrastructures and economic processes of digital platforms in scientific practices in order to meet the demands suggested by acceleration, replicability, efficiency, and visibility. These administrative values favor large companies in the scientific publishing market as “providers of solutions” to act in all research stages.

The Latin Americans [fault](https://academic.oup.com/joc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/joc/jqab025/6359522?searchresult=1) the [Northern manifesto](https://academic.oup.com/joc/article/71/1/1/5803422)'s one-size-fits-all preoccupation with replicability and pre-registration—practices that claim to be universal but presume a particular epistemology. The critique cuts deep: The authors want to say that a focus on procedural OS practices not only ignores, but may even mask, the way that communication research throws up hurdles for scholars outside the Global North to access the field's reputational center. The open science on offer, they add, risks shoveling fuel into the engine of the Big Five publishing oligopoly.

Their [counter-model](https://academic.oup.com/joc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/joc/jqab025/6359522?searchresult=1) is the Latin American tradition of fee-free open access publishing, coupled with the region's historical openness to alternative and critical approaches to the field.

The best way to read the piece is as a space-clearing salvo—a notice served that a term with lots of mainstream momentum, "open science," remains up for grabs.

Ansh Bhatnagar, [writing for *Tribune*](https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/08/we-cant-trust-the-market-with-scientific-knowledge), the revived magazine of the British left:

> Scientific knowledge doesn’t just need to be free to read – it needs to be owned and democratically controlled by the society it is meant to benefit. Publicly owned scientific publishing is the way to do that.

It's a good [piece](https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/08/we-cant-trust-the-market-with-scientific-knowledge), grounded in the view that scholarship and profit are in irredeemable conflict. Still, the idea of "public ownership" is, at best, ambiguous—elsewhere in the [article](https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/08/we-cant-trust-the-market-with-scientific-knowledge) Bhatnagar seems to refer to public *funding* paired with ownership and governance by the academic community. That sounds right—direct state ownership less so.

Gabe Stein, in a smart critique of Joseph Berstein's Harper's takedown of 'Big Disinfo'

Thus, explaining away attempts to understand the information ecosystem as merely the theater the Establishment needs “to build a political world that still makes sense,” as Bernstein does, is just as much of a simplification as the Big Disinfo theory. Even if Bernstein’s own conspiracy is true, and politics and advertising have been nothing but theater the whole time, the Establishment has been remarkably successful at guiding everything from the stage for centuries, and large parts of it are having little trouble adapting to whatever’s going on now.

Berstein's piece is right as far it goes, but it goes too far.

I can't help but quibble with what is a much smaller detail in the Harper's story:

[I]n the late 1930s, the Rockefeller Foundation began sponsoring evangelists of a new discipline called communication research. The psychologists, political scientists, and consultants behind this movement touted their methodological sophistication and absolute political neutrality. They hawked Arendt’s “psychological premise of human manipulability” to government officials and businessmen, much as the early television ad executives had. They put themselves in the service of the state.

There's some truth here—lots of mid-century communication researchers worked for the state, hawking their "psychological warfare" expertise. But their main, public-facing finding was that media have limited effects. They wrote, and re-wrote, Berstein-style correctives long before he was born.

Gareth Leng and Rhodri Igor Leng, in an excerpt from their 2020 book The Matter of Facts:

Pieter Kroonenberg, a Dutch statistician, discovered a nonexistent paper that had been cited more than 400 times. The phantom paper was cited as:

Van der Geer, J., Hanraads, J. A. J., Lupton, R. A. 2010. The art of writing a scientific article. J Sci. Commun. 163 (2) 51–59.

This originated as a hypothetical example given in a style guide used by Elsevier to illustrate how to reference in particular journals. We confirmed, by a search in the Web of Science, that it had been cited more than 480 times by 2019. Most of these came from abstracts in conference proceedings, and it seems likely that many authors had misunderstood that this was an example of how to cite, not an example of something that should be cited. But the reference also appeared in 79 journal papers. Of these, 13 were connected together through references, and in these, it was bizarrely used to support the claim that a compound called rutin could dilute the blood, reduce capillary permeability and lower blood pressure.

Yikes.

Arthur Levine—a reliable source for higher-ed disaster-porn—in a Chronicle piece (co-authored with Scott Van Pelt):

Anticipating such upheaval, some institutions are already evolving. […] To look forward rather than backward is no easy feat. Colleges must confront their tendency toward magical thinking — their belief that institutional challenges will somehow vanish. Another trap is complacency and an assumption of institutional exceptionalism — the idea that each college is special, shielded, somehow, from the woes confronting other institutions.

The commentary is a self-parody—a client-pitch slide deck in "prose."

From my just-published Commonplace piece on the mission-aligned funding exchange:

Any alternative to the prevailing scholarly communication system must be built atop a different funding model, one that excludes neither readers nor authors. In broad strokes, that model will center on direct support for publishing, drawn from funds currently allotted to subscription and APC spending. The same funders who finance the tolled-and-APC system—libraries but also foundations and government agencies—will, on this approach, redirect budgets to underwrite a diverse, community-led publishing ecosystem. Call it the collective funding model, predicated on open access for both readers and authors.

The main point of the article is to promote a new mechanism, which I call the mission-aligned funding exchange. The idea—barely piloted as yet—is to create matching platforms that connect fee-free OA publishers and infrastructure stewards with mission-aligned patrons in the library and foundation worlds. It is, as I write in the piece

a practical mechanism for connecting nonprofit funders with nonprofit publishers—a community-governed coordination tool for a system with many participants.