The Knowledge Futures Group's Gabe Stein, writing about the head-scratching hurdles faced by KFG in its effort to secure financial support from libraries:
If we were selling to for-profit corporations we’d mostly be able say “enter your credit card info here” and that would be that. If we were a for-profit corporation ourselves, the interface would be at least a little bit simpler because we’d be able to say “you pay us for these exact services, which we take away if you don’t continue to pay us” […] But being a mission-driven nonprofit with values that align with universities has, ironically, made it much, much harder to be supported by those universities.
At mediastudies.press we face this problem too. Library and university procurement policies make it hard for even well-meaning librarians to commit direct support to publishers. There's some serious madness here. Libraries are choking on the oligoplolists' subscription and APC costs. They're generally sympathetic to the community-led, nonprofit alternative. There are plenty of other obstacles in shifting dollars to the KFG's of the world; red tape and we've-always-done-it-this-way inertia shouldn't be one of them.