An important commentary from the Knowledge Futures Group leads responsible for PubPub and the Underlay, reacting to Clarivate's ProQuest acquisition:

These days, Elsevier and other major publishing companies operate more like Clarivate, an analytics company that not only mines data from their own products and services, like Web of Science, but also privatizes open data sets to their advantage. Soon enough, most research will be “open,” but it won’t be without cost. If the academy becomes evermore intertwined with the business of selling analytics for profit, our decisions as researchers, archivists, and publishers will become even less aligned with the needs of knowledge production and more aligned with the needs of appeasing commercial algorithms that have different definitions of “success.” The impacts of the corporatization of information and the prioritization of data over people have already been felt by the news, retail, and entertainment industries. Moves driven by data analytics are good for business but potentially devastating for the health of ecosystems and the people who comprise them. And academic publishing is next (indeed, if it hasn’t already been happening for years).

It's an astute read on the datafied surveillance capitalism coming for scholarly communication. The authors endorse the Publish, Review, Curate (PRC) model that's gaining some promising traction, admitting the cultural and tenure-review challenges:

Little will change unless researchers believe that they can secure a future for themselves by participating in PRC publishing models. For that change to happen, tenure and promotion committees must be willing to value PRC-produced research as highly as papers published in traditionally elite journals. But few people submit PRC-produced research to those committees, so why would they consider valuing it? Simply put, the dam won’t break until researchers demand that their institutions value PRC-produced research.

From a sobering new post on SciDev.Net:

[F]or many researchers in the developing world, who do not have a grant or an institution to cover the fees, the open access system can lock them out of top tier academic journals.

Bonaventure Tetanye Ekoe, honorary dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Yaoundé I in Cameroon, says the open access model means African researchers are penalised twice.

“The first time they are penalised because there is no money to fund their research. A second time because even when they manage to do their research, they are asked to pay to publish a paper. “So that means that, since they don’t publish, they will perish,” he tells SciDev.Net.

The cost of submitting a paper can be many times a researcher’s salary. For example, the monthly salary of a PhD assistant researcher in Cameroon is estimated at just over US$350.

It's telling that the piece equates OA with APC/read-and-publish OA, given the recent read-and-publish momentum. The ramshackle waiver system also comes in for some deserved bashing.

It's a reminder that the APC/read-and-publish future we're hurtling towards is likely to worsen global inequalities in scholarly communication.

From the superb, just-released COPIM report on collective funding models, which interviewed academic librarians:

According to some of our respondents, the funds potentially available to support library membership programmes were also being squeezed by the rise of transformative [i.e., read-and-publish] agreements. These are agreements between libraries and publishers to turn subscription expenditures into funds to support open access publishing. As one of our respondents noted [...] in some cases major commercial publishers are using transformative agreements as a way of increasing the total amount charged to libraries, by adding open access publishing costs on top of normal subscription costs. The effect, our respondent suggested, was to drain the pool of money available for supporting forms of open access outside of these agreements, including library membership programmes.

This read-and-publish funding lockdown is happening right now—in dozens of mid-negotiation deals slated (it's safe to assume) to be announced over the next six months. We're running out of time.

Emily Farrell, in a Scholarly Kitchen post:

Monographs, by their nature as specialized texts, often see low usage. Scholarly publishers are aware that in order to support a diverse program of scholarship, it can be necessary to subsidize, in part, long-form works that have a narrow audience. Other, more equitable models are emerging to support open book publishing. There are fully open access presses, like University College London Press and Athabasca Press, that are thriving using an institutionally supported model to support mission-driven monographs publishing. There are increasing numbers of scholar-led and university owned publishers, many of which are open access. There are new cooperative models for books that, like [MIT's] D2O, forge a more cooperative pathway for monographs. Opening the Future, currently in implementation with Central European University Press, is another example of an approach that builds a community around scholarly books publishing. All of these models are looking towards more collaborative, equitable, and accessible ways to open books for authors and readers while maintaining financial sustainability.

It's a good piece, but weirdly silent on the 800-pound rival to the surveyed models: the book processing charge (BPC). It's hard to argue for an alternative to the author-excluding BPC without confronting its existing foothold.

The indisensable OA observer Richard Poynder dropped another hefty ebook (163 pages!), Information Wants To Be Free, in December. From Poynder's post introducing the book:

While what I say might be slightly overweight in European developments, it may not matter if (as I believe is possible) events in Europe end up determining how open access develops globally. 

I say this because it seems possible that European OA initiatives will reconfigure the international scholarly communication system, and in ways that OA advocates will not be comfortable with. 

I've just begun reading the tome, but Poynder's top-level point—that European initiatives (chiefly Plan S) may be ushering in a closed-authorship OA regime—is undeniable.

From the press release announcing the exciting merger of Open Library of Humanities and Birkbeck College:

The OLH is an academic-led, gold open-access publisher (articles are freely and permanently accessible for everyone, immediately after publication) with no author-facing charges.

OLH's estimable lead, Martin Eve, continues his noble if quixotic campaign to rescue "gold" from its now-entrenched linkage with the APC. Eve has repeatedly, and correctly, noted that the "diamond" appellation is often used in error (as in this Plan S post):

Diamond, however, is also a category error. While “gold” and “green” open access refer to conditions of availability – at the publisher and in a repository respectively – diamond denotes the financial conditions under which a publisher operates. Hence, while the term is meant to connote a supreme condition in which infrastructure exists transparently without financial demands from authors or readers, it also helps to cement the false certainty, erroneously held by many researchers, that “gold” open access means article processing charges (APCs).

True, but the lexical ship has already set sail. It may be that, logic aside, it's too useful to have a quick metaphor to make the crucial no-fee vs. APC distinction.