This April piece by COPIM's Samuel Moore has aged pretty well:

If things were tough already for small, not-for-profit, and university press publishers, they are going to get worse during the downturn. Higher education is predicted to be badly hit by the crisis and this will have a knock-on effect on purchasing decisions, university press subsidies and overall budget availability.

[..]

[University of Michigan Press director Charles Watkinson] is absolutely correct that larger commercial publishers – the oligopoly – will be well positioned to take advantage of new economic conditions and will probably even further consolidate their market power. In controlling the majority of academic journals, these companies will be able to price journal packages in a way that makes them attractive to cash-strapped institutions, giving them a competitive advantage over the smaller publishers, not-for-profits, monograph publishers, and so on. Where open access is concerned, this will mean banging to the beat of the oligopoly’s drum, likely through increased transformative agreements, APC publishing and infrastructures that track researchers and monetise their data.

It is also worth remembering that open access is now key to the business strategies of large commercial publishers who have figured out how to monetise subscription content, open access content and data analytics.

[...]

So, Covid-19 does not ‘kill’ the for-profit business model [and] in fact might strengthen profiteering through the ability of the publishing oligopoly to weather the financial downturn and dictate the future of open access according to their conditions. While this might increase the amount of open access research available, it will be at the expense of the loss of control by the research community and the continued dominance of a handful of players. Such is the problem of a move to open access that is not emancipatory from capital, or at least antagonistic towards it.

Jonathan Gray, announcing his new collection, co-edited with Martin Eve:

MIT Press have recently published a new book on Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access edited by Martin Eve and myself.
[...]
My chapter, “Infrastructural Experiments and the Politics of Open Access” examines how scholarly communication infrastructures may be taken as both an object of research and a site of experimentation to explore questions of who has access, what counts, what matters, and how relations are organised.

I can't wait to dig into the whole book, which is (of course) available OA.

From the press release on the just-released SPARC Europe report copyright and licensing policy [pdf]:

Clear from this study: the majority of publishers have yet to embark on a more OA friendly policy journey, though some are making preparations. “If these publishers choose to continue on their current course, their authors will continue to find complying with OA policy requirements problematic — unless funders change their grant conditions and/or institutions/authors retain their rights,” wrote the authors.

The whole report is worth reading, but of special interest are the recommendations, which lay out best practices for foot-dragging publishers (and other stakeholders). Still, SPARC Europe's fixation on CC BY—part of a wider CC BY fetishism in segments of the OA world—is frustrating. There are good reasons to encourage non-commercial OA licenses like CC BY-NC: to block commercial exploitation and to encourage a nonprofit scholarly communication ecosystem.

A deeply cynical Forbes piece by Kaplan's Brandon Busteed:

The current narrative about the edtech industry is that it’s driven by innovative disrupters from outside of education – the proverbial Silicon Valley story of tech entrepreneurs finding solutions to all our most vexing problems. This disrupter story gets even more pronounced in higher education by the contrasting view of colleges and universities as institutions beholden to tradition, held back by faculty who are reticent to change. But that narrative is going to shift.

Faculty, Busteed writes, are responsible for MOOCs and have founded a bevy of startups. So the campaign to remake higher ed in the image of venture capital is, his reasoning goes, organic after all.

This is hogwash, of course: The fact that a growing number of aca-entrepreneurs betray their own values to enrich themselves doesn't mean that the decades-old commercialization trend is faculty-led. Busteed, anyway, doesn't really believe his own thesis. The reason to prime this narrative pump, he admits, is widespread faculty opposition. If only those pesky academics could be convinced that their peers were leading the charge, perhaps they'd stand down:

Any time “disruption” or “reform” is brought up in education circles, it typically raises the hackles of teachers and faculty. But when a new initiative or disruption is led by a faculty member, it certainly changes the tone and considerably lessens potential negativity and resistance. This is not to say that all faculty innovations prove successful, nor that outsiders can’t build incredibly successful initiatives. But holding the idea constant, one initiated by faculty – by insiders – has an ‘acceptance’ advantage over something developed outside the academy. In short, there’s inherent credibility in faculty-generated innovations and we would all be wise to pay closer attention to faculty-driven innovation, to proactively seek it out and to embrace it when it happens.

Busteed wants to bring about the misleading narrative he purports, in the piece's headline and opening grafs, to merely describe. As pro-corporate propaganda.

Techcrunch:

It’s been a big year for online learning companies — and it sounds like Thinkific is no exception. The Vancouver-based startup is announcing that it has raised $22 million in new funding.

Thinkific is different from businesses such as MasterClass (which raised $100 million this year) and Skillshare (which raised $66 million) because it doesn’t create, distribute or monetize online classes itself. Instead, it’s built a platform where anyone can create their own courses, then sell them on their own websites.

From the main VC:

“Working with Thinkific over the past four years has been nothing short of exceptional,” said Rhino Managing Partner Fraser Hall in a statement. “It’s no secret that its business model, user numbers, and ~ 150% year-over-year revenue growth, is tracking, by stage, very closely to Shopify which is now Canada’s most valuable public company … It’s a model that is undoubtedly shaping a new world of knowledge entrepreneurship and one that’s accessible to any individual or organization that wants to add education as a new revenue channel.”

The gold rush continues.

From an NSF-funded, cross-university campaign to oil the gears of faculty profiteering:

In order to gain broad support for the recognition of [Innovation & Entrepreneurship] within [Promotion and Tenure] guidelines and processes, it is critical that I&E supporters on university campuses use language and terminology which is relatable across their institution. For example, PTIE organizers and many others have found that use of the “societal” or “public”  phraseology (e.g. societal / public impact, societal need, Public Impact Research) to be an effective mechanism to inclusively engage with faculty around the topics of I&E.

Translation: Bathe the proposal to promote profiteering in the misleading language of "public impact." As if the point isn't clear—don't dare call the proposal for what it is—the statement continues:

Use of alternate terms such as “economic impact” or “market impact” can create a misperception of an overweighting of importance on the financial aspects of the faculty member’s work in I&E. Additionally, not all I&E-related impact has an immediate and/or overt linkage to a financial transaction. This approach allows the topic to be viewed more broadly across campus and support a wider cross-section of faculty.

If these are indeed "recommendations", the main one is to lie to fellow faculty.