From the imitable Corey Doctorow, in a good, link-filled post on the scholarly publishing scam:

It’s been four years since MIT’s decision to boycott Elsevier, and things are going great. The open access consortium SPARC just published a stocktaking of MIT libraries without Elsevier

How are MIT’s academics getting by without Elsevier in the stacks? Just fine. If someone at MIT needs access to an Elsevier paper, they can usually access it by asking the researchers to email it to them, or by downloading it from the researcher’s site or a prepress archive. When that fails, there’s interlibrary loan, whereby other libraries will send articles to MIT’s libraries within a day or two. For more pressing needs, the library buys access to individual papers through an on-demand service.

This is how things were predicted to go. The libraries used their own circulation data and the webservice Unsub to figure out what they were likely to lose by dropping Elsevier – it wasn’t much!

Doctorow overestimates the danger to Elsevier et al, especially since other big libraries—notably the UC system—capitulated. The MIT story may hint at a solution to the collective action problem, but until a trans-Atlantic coalition of prominent libraries follows suit, it’s just a noble experiment.

From the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) recently released Contracts in Publishing: A Toolkit for Authors and Publishers:

Academic and scientific publishing is mainly concerned with the production and distribution of works of scholarly research through journals, non-fiction books and online resources. There are fast-moving and complex developments and debates in academic publishing around OA and openeducational resources (OERs). OA refers to materials that are freely available for anyone to use in their existing form; they may not be revised, repurposed or redistributed without the permission of the rights holder. OER refers to teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain where users are allowed to use as is, repurpose or tailor the materials according to their teaching or learning needs. The material can be shared or altered without permission or attribution.

It’s one of only two passing mentions of OA, and it’s plain wrong on repurposing and distribution (for most licenses); the contrast to OER (including the “public domain” statement) is equally weird. WIPO is the world’s IP broker, so it’s not surprising that OA gets short, inaccurate shrift. One irony: the toolkit carries a CC BY 4.0 license itself, so anyone may remix, transform, and build upon it for any purpose, as long as it’s attributed.

A good piece from the AAUP’s Academe on the encroachment of corporate software (like so-called “learning management systems” (LMSs)):

While commercialization of data, including user-generated content and intellectual property, occurs behind the scenes unregulated, senior administrators who license and purchase such systems are often complicit in profit-driven contracts that heavily advantage corpo­rate vendors and force end users to agree to all terms in their entirety to use the service. For a student, not using the service would mean not enrolling in a given class, because use of these platforms is often com­pulsory. Indeed, at Rutgers, as at many colleges and universities, students and instructors are never asked to give consent for their data to be used in LMS plat­forms. The university does so for us, on our behalf, without making this evident or explicit to us.

The authors, all based at Rutgers, summarize a report they completed for their AAUP chapter—and link to a companion journal article.

Since the Academe piece was published: Canvas maker Instructure was acquired by private equity firm KKR for $5 billion.

From a short piece I recently published in the European media studies journal NECSUS:

The real question is political will. If the scholarly publishing system is hurtling toward open access, who will pay for it? There are two choices, in effect: authors or direct support for publishing. Hinging authorship on the ability to pay is a bald injustice. If we are committed to furnishing open access for readers and authors alike, we need to push for what is the only fair way forward: collective funding. Recent developments in Europe and Latin America furnish a glint of promise for an APC-free future. The big commercial publishers will, however, fight to retain their obscene OA profits. The choice of which path to take will, ultimately, fall to universities, scholars, and the public who fund both. In that respect mediastudies.press is a political statement. Together with its scholar-led peers, we hope to demonstrate, in miniature, that a different publishing world is possible.

Janneke Adema and Sam Moore, in one of the very best scholarly articles on academic publishing I’ve read in a long time:

[I]f you give scholars (for example) one day of unstructured autonomous time a week to work on scholar led publishing projects, a burgeoning, community-controlled ecosystem of publishing projects could flourish. They could, as we have identified in the piece, work together jointly and in new kinds of collectivity, foregrounding an ethic of care for publishing over a commercial logic of choice. This, we hope, would encourage others to do likewise by redirecting the work they do for commercial actors towards in-house alternatives.

Those are the last few lines of the piece, published as part of new formations’s “Public Knowledge” issue. Adema and Moore make the case for folding scholar-led publishing into academic work, as a way to reclaim publishing for the academy and—crucially—to help the university live up to its own (purported) values. They position their idea as a “utopian demand” (borrowing from Kathi Weeks): it “asks us to imagine alternative futures for work, while at the same time being performative, where the demand itself prefigures a different world.”

Arash Abizadeh, in a sharp Guardian piece—a follow up to the mass resignation of Abizadeh and co-editors from Wiley’s Philosophy & Public Affairs:

[…] as editors of one of our field’s leading journals, we feel a strong responsibility to help build collective momentum towards a better arrangement: a publishing model that no longer wastes massive amounts of public resources feeding profits to private corporations, secures editorial independence against the pressures of profit-making and makes research available to everyone, free of charge. This isn’t just an academic problem. A revolution in the publishing landscape could also help stem the tide of disinformation and propaganda in the public sphere. Such an alternative is available, but it’s hard to get there. We want to change that.

Abizadeh and co. are—like some other corporate-journal refugees—re-launching with the Open Library of Humanities. The piece itself is a cleanly written precis of the stakes and solutions—one of many over the years, but we need them to keep coming.