Ashley Jester, in a must-read in Commonplace:

When a deal is struck that covers some or all of the APCs, that deal explicitly validates the idea that APCs are an appropriate part of the open access ecosystem.  You are no longer arguing about whether or not individual authors should have to pay to publish their work openly but are merely haggling over the terms. 

The essay makes a lucid case that read-and-publish deals—like the one that UC struck with Elsevier, or the slew of recent Cambridge agreements—are lowering barriers to readers by raising them for authors. Read-and-publish deals look they're building a public good, but they're actually more like Gramercy Park—a deal-by-deal club good for those who can afford to author.

Speaking of read-and-publish, here are my quoted thoughts at the end of Inside Higher Ed piece on the big Cambridge deal:

One of the primary concerns about read-and-publish deals is that in the long term, the “barriers currently imposed on readers will be erected for authors instead,” said Jefferson Pooley, professor of media and communication at Muhlenberg College.

“There is an obvious momentum for read-and-publish deals, and for better or worse -- I think worse -- it’s becoming clear this is the strategy that publishers are employing in response to Plan S,” Pooley said.

While read-and-publish deals might work fine for wealthy U.S. institutions, they are not as likely to work well for institutions that don’t have strong library budgets.

“I think the result in the U.S. and in the world will be the creation of an authorial underclass -- people who don’t have access to authorship in journals because their institutions didn’t have a subscription deal in the first place that they could transition into a read-and-publish deal,” said Pooley.

“It strikes me as Pyrrhic victory if open access comes at the cost of erecting new barriers to authorship,” he said.

Jennifer Frederick and the Ithaka S+R team, reporting on library budget cuts on The Scholarly Kitchen back in December:

With so many US academic libraries facing cuts, some might be tempted to assume that the sector is bottoming out and will soon recover. To the contrary, we see risks of a further slide. In the current set of findings, nearly a quarter of responding directors report not having a budget for the current fiscal year: this often means that they are subject to expenditure controls and will spend less, in some cases far less, than they did in previous years. And while many directors are not sure what the future will bring, we have heard anecdotally from some that the cuts they are experiencing in the current fiscal year are part of a university effort to smooth anticipated reductions over two or more years, meaning that they anticipate further cuts next year. While a more optimistic scenario remains possible as the political and public health situations develop, it would be irresponsible to forecast that the sector has reached a nadir. 

The cuts are coming even as the read-and-publish tsunami locks in library spending for the closed authorship model.

Mahdi Khelfaoui and Yves Gingras, in a recent Journal of Scholarly Publishing article [paywalled, sadly]:

In this article, we analyse a relatively recent commercial strategy used by large academic publishers to capitalize on the brand names of their most prestigious scientific journals. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s model of capital conversion, we explain how publishers transfer the symbolic capital of an already prestigious journal to derivative journals that share in the prestige of the original brand and transform it into new economic capital. As shown by their high impact factors, these newly created journals benefit from the name recognition and reputation of the originals after which they are named. Plus, through a manuscript routing mechanism, the publishers recycle some of the submissions rejected by their highly selective flagship journal by redirecting those manuscripts, along with their reviews, to derivative journals or to one of the lower-impact journals on their list, which may require an article processing charge for publication.

I picture the SpringerNature people consulting a thesaurus for Nature modifiers.

Update: A substantially similar version of the paper is available OA here [pdf].

Peter McMahan and Daniel McFarland, in a just-published American Sociological Review article:

By curating the published research in an area, [literature] reviews highlight certain connections between publications while obscuring others, dramatically simplifying a domain of knowledge. They focus scholarly attention around a few key publications and the relations between them at the expense of the broad majority of the research in a domain. Upon inclusion in a review article, the seminal research in a domain is apt to become forgotten, replaced by work that drew connections between existing ideas rather than generating new ones. This suggests the substance of scientific progression may be located somewhere between revolutionary shifts in paradigms of thought at one extreme and the ordinary science of cumulative advancement at the other. The synthetic work that is foundational to scientific discovery is an ongoing process of redefined frames imposed through micro-erasure. This continual, destructive restructuring of discourse constitutes the churning substrate on which significant swaths of knowledge are created.

Fascinating: The pedestrian, even thankless work of the literature review is—in its quiet way—setting the scholarly agenda.

From the Medium post announcing that scite has struck a deal with Wiley to embed its contextual citation snippets (dubbed, inevitably, Smart Citations) into over a hundred Wiley journals:

Smart Citations display the context of each citation to a publication, allowing readers to see not only how many times a publication has been cited but also how it was cited. Additionally, scite has deployed a state-of-the-art deep learning model to classify the citation statement as providing supporting or disputing evidence for the cited claim.

I've been following scite since its 2019 launch: It's a small, for-profit Brooklyn-based startup that launched with a $350k investment from NY-based ff Venture Capital. The firm, curiously, has won most of its subsequent funding from federal grants, including a $1.5 million award in May 2020 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).

The company, in effect, is trying to monetize Henry Small's 30-year-old notion of citation context analysis (elaborated in a 1982 out-of-print book chapter).¹ Scite extracts the text around a citation and then—using a machine-learning model—makes a guess on valence: Is the cite "supporting," "disputing," or a mere "mention"?

Interesting. Too bad it's a for-profit, and landing deals that, possibly, will rationalize (in both senses) strategic submission behavior and prop up the journal prestige economy.