Huge announcement from Open Library of Humanities (OLH) lead Caroline Edwards, writing for LSE Impact:

According to Jisc’s own review of transitional agreements in the UK published in March 2024, “it would take at least 70 years for the big five publishers to flip their TA titles to OA.” These same deals expired at the end of 2024. By all accounts, negotiations for renewals have stalled, which brings the prospect of a collapse in nationally agreed digital services to university libraries closer. Those of us working in not-for-profit “diamond” open access publishing, such as myself, argue that now is the time to divest entirely.

Enter the Open Journals Collective, modeled on its successful books counterpart—and really the culmination of OLH’s decade-plus pioneering of the library-membership approach to diamond OA.

Today […] is therefore a timely moment to be launching the Open Journals Collective (OJC) – an equitable, sustainable, community-led alternative to the big deals offered by corporate academic publishers. Drawing on more than a decade of digital publishing innovation, the OJC confronts the crisis in academic journals publishing with a viable path towards bringing journals publishing back in-house at universities.
[…]
In January 2026, the OJC will launch a collection of hundreds of journals in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Discussions are underway whether to offer a collection of science, technology, engineering, and maths journals too. We will fund the costs of publishing these journals diamond open access through a library membership model. This allows journals with precarious income and a high degree of volunteer labour to stabilise their production and become sustainable longer term. From 2027 onwards, in the second year of the programme, we will open applications for mission-aligned publishers to join OJC and receive funding for their diamond open access journals. We’ll also encourage academic editors to “flip” journals away from commercial and subscription models to diamond open access at OJC.

So excited about this! Here comes the mission-aligned funding exchange.

Sue Curry Jansen and I, writing for Psyche, have a new essay out on the neglected philosopher Susanne Langer and metaphor:

Metaphor, for Langer, is language’s law of growth. When there is no word available to express a new thought, we reach for analogy – for familiar language that denotes something similar – and apply it to the new thought. We may send it out on its own or alter it in some way by, for example, adding a prefix or suffix. Our listeners grasp that the word isn’t meant literally – that it serves here as proxy for a new idea or object. The literal meaning is a symbol for the figurative meaning, the ‘thing that has no name of its own’. As the metaphor gets taken up – if it’s used enough – the word will fade to the literal, as ‘horsepower’ has for most of us. Its metaphorical quality dissipates, thereby expanding the language’s denotative stock – so the word can be lent out again to express another novel thought

It was a fun piece to write.

Back in January, I wrote about a surprising, and disappointing, sin of omission at the Charleston Hub’s Against the Grain podcast. I’m a fan of Charleston and its parent organization, Annual Reviews, for a slew of reasons (just one of which is the AR’s pioneering role in Subscribe to Open). As I wrote in January, Charleston’s podcast ran an episode sponsored by Digital Science, the Holtzbrinck-owned for-profit—corporate sibling to scholarly publishing oligopolist Springer Nature. The episode didn’t mention Digital Science’s Holtzbrinck/Springer Nature embedding, even though it featured a Digital Science VP as guest.

Here we are again, and it’s a little worse. An early March Against the Grain episode featured another Digital Science VP. This time, the whole episode was given over to a pitch for a new paid service, Digital Science’s Dimensions Author Check. The episode, it pains me to say, was barely distinguishable from an infomercial—but without any disclosure. The Digital Science sponsorship was not mentioned in the podcast itself, and even the show notes—which mention the sponsorship—fail to disclose the Holtzbrinck/Springer Nature context. The show-note disclosure is itself an ad:

This episode is sponsored by Digital Science, a global leader in AI-driven technology, providing advanced software and data solutions that empower researchers, universities, and organizations across the research ecosystem. Born out of the research community itself, Digital Science was founded by researchers who sought to solve the challenges they were facing. Now Digital Science is dedicated to making open, collaborative, and inclusive research a reality, partnering with academic institutions to provide pioneering AI-powered tools that enhance decision-making, foster innovation, and help shape a future where trusted, collaborative research drives progress for all. Learn more at https://www.digital-science.com/.

The episode closes with the Against the Grain host’s light pitch: “Tell our listeners where they can go or how they can find out more about this cool new tool.”

“Oh, thank you,” replies the Digital Science VP.

Charleston was, of course, founded to serve academic librarians. It remains a nonprofit, with a slew of initiatives, including the amazing Katina magazine, in support of that mission. Indeed, the magazine’s latest piece, “Academic Databases and the Art of the Overcharge,” is a powerful indictment of big-vendor exploitation.

So it’s disappointing to see the organization’s podcast arm serve as a greenwasher (in the currency sense) of a big five oligopolist. Sponsorship is one thing. Including reps from the sponsor on multiple episodes is another. Failing to mention the sponsorship on those episodes is an additional step. Not disclosing the sponsor’s place in the library-starving for-profit ecosystem, even in the fine print, is a real problem.

On the edge of scholarly-publishing relevance, a new journal that I’ve been building with Jamie Cohen-Cole and Philippe Fontaine—History of Social Science—has launched its first issue. The journal is published for the Society for the History of Recent Social Science (HISRESS) by Penn Press—with a good no-embargo green self-archiving policy and the aspiration to join Project MUSE’s successful subscribe-to-open program.

From the launch editorial:

Our goal for History of Social Science is to create a platform for historians of varied approaches and training. The idea is that the journal will host a conversation among historians of science, intellectual historians, and disciplinary historians—in other words, stand as a publishing complement [End Page 9] to the nascent and fruitfully polyglot community already in formation. Our conviction is that the three subcultures may continue to learn from one another. Historians of science have shown the value of foregrounding tools and practices, including their travels across disciplinary boundaries. The significance of social and cultural context—how the social sciences are embedded in and affect the societies that they study—is in turn a lesson reinforced by the example of intellectual history. Finally, disciplinary historians bring their own deep knowledge—some of it tacit, earned through training—of their specific fields. Some members of these three subcultures are already reading and citing each other, to their mutual benefit. History of Social Science intends to encourage even more cross-field sharing. With that goal in mind, the journal welcomes submissions that reflect these distinct and spreadable strengths.

The Charleston Hub (with its storied history) is an important institution in the scholarly-publishing orbit. Its most visible project is the Charleston Conference, meeting since 1980 and an indispensable gathering for librarians and publishers. In 2023 the conference (together the other Charleston initiatives) was acquired by the laudable nonprofit Annual Reviews—a pioneer in the subscribe-to-open movement. More recently Charleston and Annual Reviews launched Katina, an exciting new magazine on OA publishing and librarianship. All good—or better than good.

So I was disappointed by the latest episode of Charleston’s long-running podcast Against the Grain. It featured Mark Hannell, a Digital Science vice-president. Not coincidentally, the episode was sponsored by Digital Science too. Fine, even though it’s a little unseemly to host figures from a sponsor—it has the feel of native advertising, whereby an outfit buys legitimacy by mimicking independent content. (Choice, from the nonprofit Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), has had a similar approach recently—podcasts sponsored by Taylor & Francis, featuring lots of Taylor & Francis guests.)

The real problem, with the Charleston podcast, was the lack of sponsorship context. Listeners had no idea that Digital Science is a for-profit venture and, more importantly, an octopus arm of the sprawling, big-five scholarly publishing oligopoly. (Digital Science is owned by Holtzbrinck, Springer Nature’s parent company.)

From the show notes:

This episode is sponsored by Digital Science, a global leader in AI-driven technology, providing advanced software and data solutions that empower researchers, universities, and organizations across the research ecosystem. Born out of the research community itself, Digital Science was founded by researchers who sought to solve the challenges they were facing. Now Digital Science is dedicated to making open, collaborative, and inclusive research a reality, partnering with academic institutions to provide pioneering AI-powered tools that enhance decision-making, foster innovation, and help shape a future where trusted, collaborative research drives progress for all. Learn more at https://www.digital-science.com/. Today’s episode features Caroline Goldsmith, Associate Director, Charleston Hub, who talks with Dr. Mark Hahnel, VP of Open Research, Digital Science, and Founder of Figshare.

The episode reports on a Digital Science survey, all of it perfectly anodyne. But it’s filled with softball questions and makes no mention of profit nor Springer Nature. Listeners deserve that context.

A heroic study, given the data-collection challenges, on public funding for OA journals in Europe:

The study includes two separate components, collecting data separately for each European country (including transcontinental states): (1) the volume and key bibliometric characteristics of small- and mid-sized journal publishers and (2) information about country-level public funding mechanisms for scholarly journals. The study found that there are 16,387 journals from small- and mid-sized publishers being published in European countries, of which 36 per cent are already publishing open access. There is a large diversity in how countries reserve and distribute funds to journals, ranging from continuous inclusive subsidies to competitive grant funding or nothing at all.

There’s lots of rich data reported, including the high proportion of single-journal publishers. The authors (Mikael Laakso and Anna-Maija Multas), however, bury the lede. Here are their last two sentences:

A well-designed public funding instrument is likely to enable the existence and diversity of scholarly publication outlets, which are of high relevance to more specific audiences than just the generic universal global target audience.

Finland (as usual) is a few steps ahead.