Erin Rose Glass, in a smart 2019 post I only just discovered:

Open access has a surveillance problem.

No, I don’t mean to suggest that open access is necessarily surveillant, or that it is aiding and abetting the digital surveillance industrial complex—although it certainly can.

The problem is much worse.

Glass draws on Shoshana Zuboff's now-famous sketch of surveillance capitalism to warn about the, well, compatibility of OA with Elsevier et al.'s data turn.

As Glass states (from her own CUNY experience), there's nothing inevitable about monetized OA data. Keeping OA in-house and nonprofit is the crucial bulwark.

Bonus: The review of Zuboff Surveillance Capitalism reviews that Sue Curry Jansen and I recently published in New Media & Society.

Librarian Rachel Caldwell, in a [Scholarly Kitchen post](https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/01/13/guest-post-evaluating-publishers-as-partners-with-libraries-and-higher-education/) from January:

> Many vendors supplying academic libraries with collections and other resources engage in practices that are not only markedly out of step with the values of libraries but also misaligned with the broader values of many public institutions of higher education (HE). […] Publishers and citation index providers are important examples of vendors often out of sync with such values, not least because of the tremendous amounts of money institutions of HE pay them.

Caldwell, in the [post](https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/01/13/guest-post-evaluating-publishers-as-partners-with-libraries-and-higher-education/) and an accompanying [journal article](https://doi.org/10.3390/publications8030039), proposes to score publishers for their good citizenship. She awards points, basically, to publishers—not just their titles, but as full-fledged organizations—according to whether they match the academic community's values. So a publisher like Elsevier, for example, might get dinged for a history of lobbying against broader access, or for steep APCs. Indeed, in Caldwell's [sample chart](https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/01/13/guest-post-evaluating-publishers-as-partners-with-libraries-and-higher-education/), California's eScholarship Publishing edges out Elsevier by a two-to-one margin.

It's a good idea, though I doubt a single-score metric is the best route to take. It's Caldwell's [core idea](https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/01/13/guest-post-evaluating-publishers-as-partners-with-libraries-and-higher-education/)—to make mission alignment a key criterion in library spending—that's worth emulating.

Scott Galloway, in a [breezy TechCrunch interview last March](https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/11/professor-scott-galloway-just-raised-30-million-for-an-online-school-that-upskills-managers-fast/) about his VC-backed startup offering short-run "sprint" class with "superstar" profs:

> I’m not going to disclose the exact economic agreement. What I will say is that we see attracting these superstars and retaining them as key to our value proposition. And so our aim is that this is the greatest compensation per podium hour that they’re going to receive. If you have a course with 800 people, and they’re each paying $800, that’s $640,000. As you can imagine, there is a lot of gross margin capital that can be deployed or can be paid to the professor.

What a jackass.

Bo-Christer Björk, [in his sharp if studiously neutral account of high journal costs](https://harisportal.hanken.fi/en/publications/why-is-access-to-the-scholarly-journal-literature-so-expensive), based on Michael Porter's [five forces framework](https://hbr.org/1979/03/how-competitive-forces-shape-strategy), concludes on an upbeat:

> A promising new strategy is the signing of transformative license deals between national library consortia and individual publishers. […]. If such deals become commonplace, this approach would enable publishers to gradually transform their journals to full OA at around the same income level as before. For libraries, it would secure a more predictable transition period. Also, the need to invest time and money in the green alternative of institutional repositories would decrease. And lastly, authors could continue publishing in exactly the same journals as before.

The critical flaw in Björk's reasoning comes in the last sentence. Most of the world's scholars could not, in fact, publish in exactly the same journals as before. Only from the perspective of Björk's Finland and other rich nations does read-and-publish look like "open" access. It's closed-authorship for the rest of us.

A pair of revealing anecdotes from [this *Insights* piece](https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.533/) on a two-book OA collaboration between the University of Liverpool's press and library. One of the authors (protected from shame as "Author B") turned in a final manuscript 50,000 words over the contracted limit:

> When questioned, Author B stated that they had assumed that, because the book was being published electronically, the word count would not matter. Despite having published open access material previously, Author B was not aware that electronic publications incurred the usual publishing costs, and specifically those relating to copyediting and typesetting.

The second [anecdote](https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.533/#): The Liverpool partners were alarmed to see that (unnamed) third-partly sellers of the books' print editions often stripped out the OA notice:

> Interestingly, even book suppliers to academic libraries are failing to include this important piece of metadata. Of the suppliers looked at as part of the project, only one included the information regarding the open status of the book.

A final tidbit: The [piece](https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.533/#) reveals that Liverpool University Press estimates book production costs of £8,500, inclusive of an "operational cost" of £6,000.

I missed this when it [launched back in June](https://thesociologicalreview.org/announcements/news/welcome-to-our-new-open-acjcess-publishing-platform/):

> The Sociological Review, the home for critical sociological thinking and research in the UK and internationally for the past 113 years, has today (8 June 2021) launched an ambitious open-access publishing platform aimed at a broad and diverse global readership.

The [new platform](https://thesociologicalreview.org/) includes a new, open access [Magazine](https://www.thesociologicalreview.org/magazine/)—the latest is on [Film and Television.](https://thesociologicalreview.org/magazine/august-2021/). As a longstanding [journal](https://journals.sagepub.com/home/sor), *The Sociological Review* remains locked behind a paywall. But the journal is, without saying so, plainly laying the foundation for a transition to OA.