The kind folks at the Open Access Books Network invited me to speak at one of their BoOkmArks conversations about the fledgling OA press I founded, mediastudies.press. They've since posted the video recording.

Joseph Esposito and Michael Clarke, in a November Scholarly Kitchen post on PLOS's new Communication Action Publishing (CAP) funding scheme:

It is our constant refrain to society publishers, among many not-for-profit organizations, that despite their IRS status, they will have to learn to operate in the marketplace directly against for-profit firms whose primary mission is to benefit their shareholders. CAP is a rebuke to this perspective. While it will operate in a business-like way (the strategic analysis and business modeling that went into its creation is impressive), it is built upon a platform of community cooperation. In this it is of the same spirit as calls for the academy to “take back” publishing from commercial firms. It is thus not only a business model or a publishing service, but a social experiment. What would the world look like outside the rigors of the marketplace? Perhaps there is a revolution brewing in the PLOS offices in San Francisco and a generation from now we will look back and say, that is where it started.

I am less optimistic, but hope to be proven wrong.

The basic idea of the CAP scheme is to shift the cost burden from authors to institutions. Member universities pay an annual fee based on their faculty's publishing over the previous five years. To prevent free riders, PLOS is graduating APCs for non-members at an aggressive rate, so that, in two years, the fees will jump about 50 percent.

PLOS, to its great credit, recognizes the injustice of an APC system that, ironically, the nonprofit helped to inaugurate in the early 2000s. In defense of the new plan, see the sophisticated reasoning of PLOS's Sarah Rouhi, in a recent interview with Richard Poynder.

I am, however, wary of the scheme, which at its core is a variant on the read-and-publish deal. In 2019 the term "pure publish" was coined to designate a read-and-publish style deal that, however, featured an already-OA publisher like PLOS. In fact Lisa Hinchliffe's overview of "pure publish" was pegged to the University of California's early 2020 agreement with PLOS along these lines.

The problem with CAP/pure publish is the problem with read-and-publish: Most of the world's institutions won't be able to pay the membership charges, even with the tiered, author-count pricing. These institutions—and all unfunded scholars that work at them—certainly can't afford the escalating APCs that, in the CAP scheme, are intended to force membership. The likely outcome, in some ways, is even worse than the read-and-publish deals with traditional tolled publishers, since at least in those scenarios tolled-access "free" submission remains an option for hybrid journals. In the PLOS model, scholars around the world are likely to be excluded from authorship altogether.

The key problem with the CAP is the membership charge calculation—based authorship counts. That metric presumes, holding authorship constant, that every institution has an equal ability to pay. But this assumption is profoundly wrong. So the CAP will have a similar (if differently patterned) effect to the APC itself: Shifting barriers to access from readers to authors.

The virtue of collective funding schemes like Open Library of Humanities' is that contributions are based, in large part, on ability to pay. Though there are obvious logistical challenges, it is easy to imagine a contribution scheme scaled to wealth measures like per capita national GDP and budget per student. Every institution, under an ability-to-pay formula like this, would contribute to the pot according to its means. The otherwise excluded—which is to say, most of the world's scholars—would retain the right to authorship.

Montana State librarian Leila Sterman, on switching to Shareyourpaper.org for repository processing:

While we haven’t perfected all of our internal processes yet, the introduction of Shareyourpaper into our workflow has decreased the time spent sending out article requests and doing copyright clearance from nearly 2 1/2 days (for about 100 articles) to close to 2 1/2 hours!

I often nudge scholars in projects I'm working on to submit to nonprofit repositories, without much success. Now I point them to Shareyourpaper.org, and they actually follow through.

Grigori Guitchounts, [writing last week for *Undark*](https://undark.org/2021/01/14/big-science-publisher-is-going-open-access/) on the [usurious *Nature* APC](https://www.nature.com/nature/about/our-publishing-models):

> Only the wealthiest universities in the wealthiest countries will be able to foot these bills. As a result, the range of researchers able to publish open-access papers in Springer Nature’s top journals will be narrow. The ivory tower, already full of inequalities, will only grow more divided. The “haves” will be able to publish openly in widely read and cited journals, which will in turn allow them to secure coveted research funding and academic posts. The “have-nots” may still choose to publish in Nature, but their work will remain hidden to much of the world, behind a paywall. The rich will get richer.

Maybe it will take a revolt of the privileged to weaken the [APC scourge](https://items.ssrc.org/parameters/the-library-solution-how-academic-libraries-could-end-the-apc-scourge/). It would be ironic if intra-elite inequality dented a system whose status quo—$3,000 APCs—has long gated off OA publishing for most of the world's scholars.

To repeat the obvious, with *Nature* as late-arriving exclamation point: APC pricing has nothing to do with production costs. Almost two years out from the decision, Plan S's [doubling down on cost transparency as an APC-taming device](https://www.coalition-s.org/addendum-to-the-coalition-s-guidance-on-the-implementation-of-plan-s/principles-and-implementation/) seems [more naive than ever](https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/06/03/plan-s-and-the-transformation-of-scholarly-communication-are-we-missing-the-woods/).

From Joseph Esposito's [Scholarly Kitchen post](https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2020/10/05/the-360-competitor/) on the trade book industry, back in October:

> It is a remarkable fact that publishers have succeeded over the past two decades in reaping 100% of the efficiencies from digital media and workflows and shared none of that with authors. This will continue.

The observation, an apt one, is buried in an intelligent, insidery discussion of the mainstream industry. Esposito's [main move](https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2020/10/05/the-360-competitor/) is to analogize to scholarly publishing—with Elsevier as sector counterpart to Amazon (and maybe Berelsmann, in the future) as a potential "360° company". Esposito does not, however, extend the analogy to the "remarkable fact" above, so here it is:

> It is a remarkable fact that scholarly publishers have succceded over the past two decades in repeating 100% of the efficiencies from digital media and workflows and shared none of that with university libraries. This will continue.

(Bertelsmann's Penguin Random House, of course, [*did* end up buying](https://www.npr.org/2020/11/25/938919530/book-publisher-simon-schuster-sold-to-rival) Simon & Schuster—an object of informed speculation in Esposito's [October column](https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2020/10/05/the-360-competitor/).)

eLife's Paul Shannon, in an [interview with Scholastica on its new Sciety service](https://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/connecting-preprints-reviews-sciety/):

> So we started to develop features where you could see content in a Twitter-like feed and then follow different communities that you could come back to regularly. We’re effectively building social networking features into an aggregation service and that’s what Sciety is now. New users come to view a peer review on a preprint and then they’re encouraged to stay or come back to follow all of the work being shared in the different reviewing communities.

[Sciety](https://sciety.org) basically brings together existing preprint reviewing initiatives like [PREreview](https://www.prereview.org) and [Review Commons](https://www.reviewcommons.org), and serves up new preprint reviews in a feed. It's getting released and iterated at the same time—the agile process [discussed in the interview](https://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/connecting-preprints-reviews-sciety/)—so it's threadbare for the moment. But it's a promising [tool](https://sciety.org) in the march to a more robust [publish-then-review model](https://www.jeffpooley.com/2020/12/publication-as-curation/) built on preprints.