COPIM statement on the corporate acquisition of OA Infrastructure

peter.suber's bookmarks 2021-12-15

Summary:

"At COPIM, we have noted the recent acquisition of Knowledge Unlatched by Wiley, which itself follows Knowledge Unlatched’s opaque transition in 2016 from a UK Community Interest Company (a non-profit organisation) into a German GmbH (roughly equivalent to a UK PLC, i.e. a for-profit company). This move by Wiley is one of several recent acquisitions of open access (OA) infrastructure by large commercial organisations, such as bepress by Elsevier in 2017, and F1000 Research by Taylor & Francis in 2020. It reflects an ongoing consolidation of research infrastructure by major publishing corporations, and in particular the increasing attempts to monetise and, potentially, monopolise the infrastructures of open knowledge dissemination. From its beginning, COPIM has been driven by the belief, held by all its partners (a consortium of universities, libraries, scholar-led OA publishers and research infrastructure providers) that the infrastructure we rely on to publish and disseminate OA books should itself be open, and owned and governed by the research communities that use it. We have repeatedly cited the widely-quoted argument by Bilder, Lin and Neylon that ‘Everything we have gained by opening content and data will be under threat if we allow the enclosure of scholarly infrastructures’undefined and this motivates and shapes our work. The recent acquisitions of OA infrastructures by large for-profit corporations pose precisely this threat...."

Link:

https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/copim-statement-corporate-acquisition-oa-infra/release/1

From feeds:

[IOI] Open Infrastructure Tracking Project » Items tagged with oa.monopoly in Open Access Tracking Project (OATP)
[IOI] Open Infrastructure Tracking Project » Items tagged with oa.copim in Open Access Tracking Project (OATP)
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » infodocketGARY's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.books oa.publishers oa.scholcomm oa.publishers oa.new oa.monopoly oa.knowledge_unlatched oa.infrastructure oa.copim oa.books oa.acquisitions

Date tagged:

12/15/2021, 11:07

Date published:

12/15/2021, 11:41