From the detailed March Inside Higher Ed story on Coursera's planned IPO:

Although it is still possible to audit many Coursera courses for free, the company has evolved significantly since its early days as a provider of massive open online courses, or MOOCS. The platform’s combination of paid nondegree certificates, stackable degrees and professional credentials has forged a company with an estimated value of between $2.4 billion and $5 billion.

"Wall Street is desperately seeking high-growth, consumer-based businesses like what Coursera has become," [Daniel] Pianko said. "Massive eyeballs with a repeatable, freemium model drives the types of lofty valuations that the Coursera IPO achieves."

The IPO has since come and gone, with the Coursera market value hovering just above the larger number. The Inside Higher Ed piece helps explain why the many-pivoted, money-losing firm has won investor faith:

Coursera reported that its average acquisition cost per student for online degree programs was under $2,000 for the two years ending in December. That figure is impressively low, said [Sean] Gallagher, [a Northwestern higher ed prof].

"Based on the financial details in the [IPO] filing, it looks like there are some real efficiencies in their ability to acquire customers,” he said.

Expect more desparate Wall Street seeking to come.

SPARC North America's Claudio Aspesi, in an April piece in the Commonplace:

The core activities of senior academic administrators are threatened by algorithms that could effectively dictate how to increase research productivity, climb rankings, or raise graduation rates. If they aspire to shape the agenda of their institutions, rather than just manage them, academic leaders should take (or retake) control.

It's an interesting argument: senior administrators, don't automate yourself out of existence.

Missed this great short piece by Dafne Calvo when it ran last May:

At present, knowledge runs the risk of being capitalised by investing in proprietary software for analysis; by imposing fees for downloading scientific articles; by making methodological and theoretical decisions depending on the most cited trends. The production, consumption, and distribution of scientific outputs inspired by free culture offers practical solutions and alternatives to these problems.

One benefit of applying free culture principles to academic life—as Calvo notes—is what it means for core software and infrastructure: This stuff should be open source rather than propriety and locked down. The Invest in Open Infrastructure project is crucial in this respect, but I think we need a software ownership map too—a charting of the octopus-like conglomeration in scholar-oriented software. (Atypon, for example, is owned by Wiley—but masks this fact.) Maps and databases of this kind for mass media ownership have been a staple of media criticism for decades—like this new one.

I only just read the dueling December posts on the OASPA blog—the first an alarm-puller on the "growing emphasis" on green OA, which the signatories—a diverse lot, indeed—blamed Plan S for fanning (in part owing to its recently announced Rights Retention Strategy):

[G]reen has never been an ideal route to Open Access. It is wholly reliant upon precisely the model that the OA movement was trying to overturn – namely subscriptions. Driving green OA essentially drives subscription publishing, which we believe is not what Plan S funders are aiming to achieve. Green has been the workaround, not the desired end point.

Most of the commercial oligopolists signed—Wiley, Taylor & Francis, SAGE, and Springer-Nature—as did the two "nonprofit" university press bohemoths, Cambridge and Oxford. There were, too, a handful of British scholarly associations, including the Biochemical Society, IOP Publishing, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. Hindawi, the born-OA for-profit, signed too—but has since been swallowed whole by Wiley. The biggest surprise among the signers is Stuart Taylor, the Royal Society publishing director and force behind the praiseworthy Society Publishers' Coalition.

For all its green-shaming indignation, the post is silent on the glaring problem with most gold OA: the APC. So noted Open Book Publishers' Lucy Barnes in a comment off the post:

It’s remarkable that this post fails to mention APCs, instead falling back on vague references to ‘transformational agreements’ or ‘various models’. Any serious critique of Green OA (and imo there are particular issues with Green OA for books) has to reckon with how authors without access to funding can afford to cover 9,500-euro APCs (to use a pertinent example, given one of the signatories to this post) or how those who don’t have membership of an institution that has signed a ‘transformative agreement’ can otherwise afford to publish OA. It is disappoining to say the least that this post has swerved that problem.

Indeed. However, the post's APC avoidance—to return to the odd cast of signatories—could be due to the very real differences on the APC question among the endorsers. The Royal Society's Stuart Taylor is a vocal APC skeptic, and has trumpeted altervatives like subscribe-to-open. The big commercial players and the two university presses, by contrast, are all in with APC/read-and-publish.

The inevitable riposte followed fast, authored by the head of COAR, Kathleen Shearer. She took issue, and rightly so, at the first post's characterization of green as a shoddy workaround; publish-review-curate (PRC) models like COAR's Pubfair framework, after all, are meant to replace, not work around, the existing VOR publishing paradigm. Shearer jumped on the APC omission too:

OA repositories (referred to as green OA in the blog) are central for achieving equitable open access to research outputs world wide. Many researchers around the world do not have the means to pay OA publishing fees (APCs), nor do their governments or institutions have money for transformational agreements. Justice, equity, and fairness are fundamental principles that need to be respected in the transition to full Open Access.

Bold in the original. My sympathies are with Shearer and team green, at least insofar as APCs are tethered to gold. But I share the preference of most scholars for a stable, formatted VOR in my daily practice—even if versioning, in my view, should be more widely supported, and even though I find the PRC model attractive too.

This split personality is reflected in the two OA initiatives I give my time to: mediastudies.press, a diamond publisher, and MediArXiv, a green, subject-specific repository.

So I watch the color wars with great and ambiguous interest. APC-free gold, which is to say diamond, is a desirable destination—to be joined, with luck and labor, to a thriving PRC movement down the road.

Stuart Taylor and Kathleen Shearer, in short, are both right. Between green and gold, who are the reds?

Speaking of the [recent COPIM report on collective funding](https://zenodo.org/record/4501512#.YLeBLS_3afB), here's an excerpt on stealth for-profit [Knowledge Unlatched](https://knowledgeunlatched.org):

> In 2016, key parts of Knowledge Unlatched were bought by Sven Fund, and the organisation was turned into a for-profit company registered in Germany (Knöchelmann, 2018; Poynder, 2018; ScholarLed, 2019). This generated some controversy in the OA community (see, for instance, Joy’s [2018a] comments), in part as there seemed to be a lack of transparency around the process. Controversies have also arisen over some of Knowledge Unlatched’s other projects—the KU Open Funding Open Research Library — namely some have argued that these represent attempts to monopolise and commercialise the infrastructures of open knowledge dissemination (Barnes & Gatti, 2019; Ernst, 2019; Gatti, 2018; ScholarLed, 2019). […]

> In our workshops, surveys and interviews, KU received both positive and negative reviews. On the positive side, KU is perceived as an ambitious central hub providing a large amount of varied content from reputable presses. […] On the negative side, some participants echoed the aforementioned critiques about what was seen as efforts by KU to ‘monetise OA movement’.

Translated from report-ese, this is a damning indictment. Even so, I am continually surprised by the company's defenders in the OA community, in the face of [past and present shadiness](https://www.jeffpooley.com/2021/01/knowledge-unlatched-strikes-again-and-again/).

Chris Triggle and co-authors, in the closing paragraph of their excellent article on research metrics:

Considering the wider publishing landscape, Brembs (2019) has argued for replacing the legacy journals completely, with peer-review and publishing infrastructure governed by scholars themselves. While some will argue that such a scenario is still a long way off, however, as a first step it should be possible to build on the success of pre-print servers and provide a new model where more OA journals emerge that operate under the same principles of preprint servers with an open review process conducted on-line and at minimal cost. Via this route there would be no reason to publish in traditional journals. […] Such an initiative certainly has its attractions; however, many questions remain such as how a new publishing model would be managed and by whom, and how it would be sustained. Also, how rapidly and how universally would such changes be accepted and granting agencies, universities and industry adjust their practices and their methods of assessment? As noted by Niles et al. (2020) resistance from some authors can also be expected. Nevertheless, it is definitely time for a change and, hopefully in 2021, 57 years after the release of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a Changin’”, there will be changes that facilitate a fully OA and online affordable publication platform as suggested above.

It's an endorsement, of the it-will-be-hard-but-what's-the-alternative variety, of a publish, review, and curate (PRC) model. Read the full article: it includes a lucid overview of the JIF's flaws and the limitations of various article or researcher-specific alterantives like the h-index. There's some good APC-bashing too. From their introduction:

The value of OA is unquestionable and we have previously argued very strongly for the removal of paywalls. Unfortunately, however, OA can come with a high price tag that is usually paid from the public purse (Triggle and Triggle 2017). These paywalls discriminate against those researchers and institutions that lack the financial resources to cover the cost of OA […] “Publish or perish” has become “Pay to Publish or Perish”, but does it have to be this way?