COPIM's Samuel Moore, in a new blog post that makes a substantive (as opposed to market-power) case for small-scale publishing:

Consider […] that publishing is a situated activity. It benefits from editorial care, community involvement and scholarly experimentation. Revenue-maximising economies of scale, upon which ‘bigger’ publishing are based, homogenise these elements, water down careful human expertise and standardise publishing through cookie-cutter production processes. This has led to the development of platformised publishing infrastructures that seek to remove human expertise where possible and automate all that goes into publishing an article. In contrast to this, small, community-led publishing is something to be valued primarily because it is embedded within the communities that produce scholarship, not abstracted from them. […] Bigness is not bad simply for market reasons, it also works against good — which is to say situated — publishing.

Also recommended: The "Scaling Small" journal article Moore recently published with fellow COPIM-inister Janneke Adema.

This is a novelty: APCs for paywalled articles, here in the case of the now-notorious American Journal of Health Behavior:

There are NO submission fees; however, should your manuscript be accepted for publication, there will be a one-time fee of $895 per article. This fee includes orchestrating the vetting, editing and archiving of manuscripts. Fee also includes EOA (early online access) and typesetting of tables, figures, and/or appendices. The fee is non-negotiable. If you are not willing to address the fee, please do not submit a manuscript for it will not be published without it.

The journal sold its entire May/June issue to vaper Juul for $51,000.

Genuinely exciting news:

We’re thrilled to announce that OA Works (formerly Open Access Button) has received a grant of $1.9M USD over the next three years from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The investment expands OA.Work’s efforts to streamline self-archiving through ShareYourPaper, and forges a new partnership with the foundation to develop tools that help put OA policies into practice.

OA.Works (née Open Access Button) is doing the best on-the-ground work in open access right now.

My reaction to the sell-off of edX, published today in The Chronicle:

Harvard and MIT have, in effect, auctioned off the lecture halls of the future. It’s a short-sighted move reminiscent of another infrastructure transfer, in scholarly publishing. As early as the 1950s, academic societies began to mimic the new sales-based commercial model of for-profit publishers. By the turn of the millennium, most societies had handed over their journals to be published by the big commercial players, in exchange for a share of profit. Now most scholarship is published by an oligopolist quintet of information conglomerates that, in turn, charge their college customers usurious fees.

That industry is among the most profitable in the world, in part because academics write and review for free. As the historian Aileen Fyfe has shown, there was nothing inevitable about the joint custody — nonprofit colleges and for-profit publishers — we’ve ended up with. We owe our current predicament, in part, to the decisions of learned societies who chose short-term cash over their scholar-members’ long-term interests. Harvard and MIT have just made the same disastrous miscalculation.

Arvind Dilawar, writing for The Nation:

Both the University of Vermont’s president and the dean of its College of Arts and Sciences explicitly cited the pandemic when discussing the need for cuts in 2020, but school administrators now deny that the proposed termination of majors, minors, and master’s programs were in any way connected to Covid.

There were no pandemic-related staff or faculty cuts,” says Enrique Corredera, director of news and information at the University of Vermont. “We did announce a hiring freeze, and we redistributed work performed by temporary employees to permanent employees in order to protect their jobs. The proposed plan to phase out low-enrollment majors and minors in the College of Arts and Sciences is part of a university-wide initiative that is not connected to the pandemic, is not limited to the College of Arts and Sciences, and has not resulted in faculty reductions.”

Never let a post-pandemic non-crisis go to waste.

Speaking of money-losing higher ed-tech IPOs, Canvas maker Instructure announced its own planned offering on Monday, citing the pandemic boom-times.

As part of an acquisition announced in December, Instructure bought a K-12 student-snooping software Videri: "Education. Driven by Data."