From the annual report of MDPI, the Swiss-based for-profit OA bohemoth:

• 165.2K peer-reviewed manuscripts published online, an increase of 55.6% in comparison to the previous year;
• 50 new journals launched, and 13 journals transferred to MDPI;
• 35 days used from submission to publication (median values for papers published in 2020);
• 15 journals newly covered by Web of Sciences, 10 journals indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded, and 29 journals indexed by Scopus;
• 33 newly affiliated societies;
• 32 conferences held and 51 stand-alone webinars.

MDPI is now the largest OA publisher in the world—a dubious marker of its quantity-over-quality hustle.

MIT Libraries' Chris Bourg, quoted in an Inside Higher Ed story on the UC-Elsevier deal:

“If pay-to-publish models (whether multi- or single-payer) become the new norm, they will inevitably lead to a system where the work of scholars from less-privileged institutions and less-well-funded disciplines will be left out, and where academic voices that have too long been silenced will remain marginalized and under-represented in the scholarly conversation,” Bourg said in an email.
It's great that UC authors will be able to publish their work openly, Bourg said. But she believes there is a risk that diversity and inclusion in scholarship will suffer if this type of deal becomes standard.
“From what we’ve seen in the public statements from both UC and Elsevier, I don’t think MIT is interested in pursuing a similar deal with Elsevier,” Bourg said.

MIT is the de facto leader of the fight against closed-author agreements like this one.

The most exciting aspect of MIT Press's Direct to Open OA book initiative is that library-participant fees are set, in part, according to ability to pay:

To determine fees that allow the offer to reach the revenue target, the Press:

• Assessed the total universe of academic institutions—by type, size, and region—that could participate in a collective open offer;
• Estimated (based on past demand) the percentage of institutions in each segment expected to commit to one or both subject collections;
• Estimated the relative value of each collection based on number of titles;
• Indexed the fee tiers based on the median acquisitions budget for each tier; and
• Set provisional fee levels sufficient to achieve the revenue target.

The MIT model was designed in collaboration with Raym Crow—arguably the leading figure in the non-APC OA funding world, going back to a classic 2006 paper on publishing cooperatives. He helped Annual Reviews with its subscribe-to-open model, and, since then, has been working with MIT Press on this Arcadia-funded project.

The best feature of the MIT model is its reliance on ability-to-pay (as proxied by acquisition budget) in setting membership fees. Not institution size, not authorship counts, nor other wealth-agnostic factors.

I finally got around to reading the forensic Chronicle account of turmoil at the anthropology journal HUA. The story, by Jesse Singal, is worth a read—it is an impressively thorough and fair-minded act of journalism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the APC shows up in one of the piece's many subplots:

Starting in the spring of 2015, HAU began asking authors for so-called article-processing charges, or APCs, to help support its open-access model in lieu of subscription fees. The way it usually worked was this: University departments or libraries often have some funds set aside for these sorts of expenses, so when an author’s piece was accepted, the author would sign an agreement stating that he or she would attempt to obtain funding, if possible. But it was generally understood that this would not be a prerequisite to publication — HAU was open access, after all, and its financial ethos centered on making academic publishing more accessible to all, readers and writers alike.

Singal describes how an author the journal had published was threatened with retraction for not—or so the editor judged—making the required "good faith" effort to track down APC dollars:

“At this stage, after 7 months of waiting, the burden is on you and your institution,” [the editor] wrote. “Should your institution be unable to cover the APC, the best I can do is to offer a 50% discount.”

“I was obviously really surprised — I kind of scrambled to do it,” recalled [the anthropologist author]. Having a paper disappeared from a publication “would be really bad,” since under normal circumstances that signals fraud, plagiarism, or some sort of major error. [The author] was able to successfully apply for 2017 APC funding from Tufts, resolving the situation. She said she had never heard of an article’s being pulled from a journal for nonpayment of a fee.

Here's an idea, premised on a pair of observations: (1) open access is now inevitable, at least for the journal literature; but in (2) an APC/read-and-publish package. There are lots of exceptions and byways, but the momentum—thanks in part to Plan S—is with an OA system financed by author charges. Let's stipulate that as a fact-in-motion, for the sake of argument.

If that's true, or largely true, OA advocates should consider a shift in focus. Our attention has been on access, for all the obvious and laudable reasons. Now the regime that we helped usher in is toppling that barrier, for readers, by erecting another, for authors. We should be fighting that tradeoff as unnecessary and unjust.

We could, I think, deploy some of the same language and logic to the fights against APCs and read-and-publish deals. I propose the Open Authorship label, together with its evil, Closed Authorship twin—to map onto platinum/diamond and gold, respectively. Lots of OA and scholarly publishing vocabulary is poised for retrofit: Tolled Authorship Journals, Author Embargoes, Author Exclusion Charges and the like. As in: Sorry, I don't review for closed authorship (CA) journals.

The point would be to resist what increasingly looks like a capital "P" Pyrrhic victory.

A Salesforce exec, in an October post hawking the company's software tools :

In a matter of months, higher education institutions have had to reinvent themselves from physical hubs of learning to digital enablers of the student journey. And while no one knows exactly how the education experience will change in the future, it’s safe to say that colleges and universities need to be agile, adaptable, and flexible enough to embrace the 'next normal' and future disruption.

Impressive: agile, next normal, and disruption all in one sentence.

Some forward-thinking higher education leaders have already taken steps to form wider and deeper ties with students. Although years behind most consumer product companies, they’re following the retail and service sectors in implementing technology to make the student and alumni experience seamless. Picture using the underlying technologies in Amazon one-click, Spotify recommendations, or the Apple Watch’s health tracking for higher education.

I can picture it. Holy hell is that a grim image.

(h/t Ben Williamson)