Defining Threat Infrastructures ‘Threat infrastructures’ are platforms that are established or promised to be established solely or primarily in order to change the behavior of incumbent initiatives through fear. In recent years, such platforms have featured heavily in the scholarly communications landscape and have been driven primarily by funders pushing for open access.

Anyone who has followed the UK government’s attitude to the sick and disabled over the past few years will be unsurprised by the way they are relaxing shielding in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

This week for COPIM we are reading Knöchelmann, Marcel, The Democratisation Myth: Open Access and the Solidification of Epistemic Injustices (SocArXiv, 9 June 2020) https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/hw7at.

OLH, obviously, has a business model for its open-access publishing. We operate due to a membership model in which approximately 300 libraries pay an annual fee so that we can exist and publish all our work openly. It works pretty well and is able to sustain our activities – so long as the pandemic doesn’t truly scupper us. Please do join! But the overheads of running that business model are not trivial.

Quite frankly, the current situation is terrifying. Another approximately 400 deaths today in the UK from the virus and the reproduction number (R) is said to be near to 1 (exponential infection rate). The UK has among the worst mortality rates in the world. But it’s being portrayed as the right time to ease the lockdown.

The world is being rapidly reshaped by pandemic conditions beyond our control. This prompted me to do some radical rethinking of my own. What if I could totally reshape copyright law? Copyright does not serve science or research well at the moment. It has pushed almost all current research exclusively into the hands of Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor &

Some choice excerpts and comments on Raym Crow. (2009). Income Models for Open Access: An Overview of Current Practice. SPARC. https://sparcopen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/incomemodels_v1.pdf. I am thinking about this in relation to the list of business models for OA books that we are building, even though it was written for journals over a decade ago.

This week for our COPIM reading group we are reading Hartley, John, Jason Potts, Lucy Montgomery, Ellie Rennie, and Cameron Neylon, ‘Do We Need to Move from Communication Technology to User Community?

Wikidata is an ambitious enterprise, but social ontologies are never language-agnostic — so the project risks perpetuating rather than transcending the worldviews most prevalent in current Wikipedia databases, which means broadly speaking global north, Anglo, western, white cishet male worldviews. I think Wikidata is perhaps promising for brute physical facts like the periodic table and biochemistry.

This week for our COPIM reading group we are turning to Osterwalder, Alexander, Yves Pigneur, and Tim Clark, Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010). Part of what we are doing is thinking through the different business models that can support open publication of monographs and figuring out how to implement these on the ground.