Jeff Pooley

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”

James Baldwin

Journal of the Knowledge Economy Journal of the Knowledge Economy is a multidisciplinary publication focused on the dynamics of knowledge creation, diffusion, and application across the ...

Irony alert: Springer Nature's Journal of the Knowledge Economy retracts 113 (!) articles from a special issue, for "compromised editorial handling," etc. Underscores one truth: special issue grift helps drive the journal-knowledge economy link.springer.com/journal/131...

How the Murdoch Family Built an Empire—and Remade the News Today, the name represents a story of profit and power unlike any other. But tracing the genealogy of Murdoch sleaze requires a long memory.

Cutting, lovely sentence-level writing in this Andrew O'Hagan essay on the Murdochs www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

Goldsmiths drops three out of five deals with big publishers.

University cites “financial and values-based” reasons for not renewing with Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley.

www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-o...

"Quick, let's screw everyone over while they're too busy getting screwed over to notice" is a hell of a business strategy

Had a great day in Paris at the École pratique des hautes études mapping out the future alignment between @ojcollective.bsky.social & @openbookcollective.bsky.social. Here’s me with @rupertgatti.bsky.social & @joedeville.bsky.social (Fernand Braudel looks on). #diamond #openaccess

Our first report is out! Read on to find out why open research practices in AHSS are diverse and extend beyond the suite of practices emphasised within dominant accounts of open science.

Sad news but honestly a good innings for an APC-free, community-led open access journal.

An interesting post from Jeff here: with my technical hat on, I've long said that collectivised systems infrastructure is the way to go for HEIs and other overstretched bodies involved in open publishing. We need to pool resources and work together rather than waste money on individualism.

fundamentally, an open and interoperable infrastructure layer, especially if hosting/membership isn’t an option (or if it excludes in an important way) is going to need OBC-style collective funding. The @openbookcollective.bsky.social isn’t the right space for that, nor is @ojcollective.bsky.social

there are lots of ways to fund infrastructure, beyond grants— a free service subsidized by a paid layer, like @thoth-metadata.bsky.social (with, though and crucially, the @openbookcollective.bsky.social help). The other option is paid hosting, like @pkp.sfu.ca or Manifold or @janewayolh.bsky.social

the point about interoperability is well taken and utterly important. But one of the facts on the ground for infrastructure makers—nonprofit and open source—is that many of them can’t even pay the bills to stay afloat, interoperability or otherwise. Some of these are not in the OA book universe

Yes, so true about @openbookcollective.bsky.social already having an infrastructure package, something that I thought about mentioning. But it is, as @alittleroad.bsky.social you say, a broader issue, the lack of an OBC-like platform for infrastructure as such—book-related or otherwise

Waiting for an open infrastructure collective @oatp.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy @investinopen.bsky.social www.jeffpooley.com/2026/01/wa...

Until Miller’s gone these are just gestural purges to sanitize and consolidate his reign of terror.

Really hard to look at this and all the other examples of bravery and kindness from ordinary people in this moment not think also of the tremendous cowardice exhibited over the past year by some of the richest, most well-protected people in business, media and politics

The fact that every right winger with influence screams "who is paying for all of this" tells you exactly how awash in cash they all are, and how much they rely on that to keep their movement afloat.

Trump administration: “Alex Pretti was a demotic terrorist who planned to massacre as many immigration officers as he could.”

Alex Pretti’s last words: “Are you okay?”

Just staggered by the complete moral void of not even *pretending* to wait for more information before pivoting to “the opponent of the state deserved it.” It is so insanely depraved. Soulless.

In hindsight, given the fetish for prediction that quant social science has always had, this seems like where the turn to data was inevitably going to go: specious and dubious prediction to feed the content mill; diluted social science to anticipate the narrative flow

Output in fully-OA journals continues to shrink while hybrid OA grows In 2024, 72% of the Open Access articles covered by this dataset were published in fully OA journals, down from 75% the year before, and 84% the year before that. The chart below compares publications in fully OA journals with those in hybrid ones.

OUTCOME: This is where Read and Publish deals have landed us folks. www.oaspa.org/news/latest-...

Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons <I>Publishing Beyond the Market</I> argues that the move to open access should focus less on the free accessibility of research outputs and more on who controls the publications and infrastructures fo...

I’ve finally been able to start reading @samuelmoore.org’s book, which is excellent. Living up to the promise of good humanistic analysis, it’s making sharp conceptual distinctions & providing me w/ better language to describe & understand what I observe in OA publishing.

doi.org/10.3998/mpub...

Wiley, as ever, serving its most important stakeholders, the shareholders.

I’m not implacably against these licenses, but in the current dispensation the scholarly communities that created, vetted, & curated the knowledge aren’t even at the table in these deals.

Of course the scammy and shameless for-profit higher ed industry is pivoting to AI
www.jeffpooley.com/2026/01/sa...

To Have Democracy, We Must Contest Data | TechPolicy.Press Emily Tucker makes the case for redlines for data, not AI—real limits on corporate data collection to protect democracy and political self-determination.

Editor's picks from 2025: Emily Tucker argues that the AI regulation debate largely misses the point: the real threat to democracy is unchecked data extraction and accumulation that is fueling corporate power.

Stop using us Jews as an excuse for doing cruel/stupid/illegal shit challenge 2026

History of Media Studies Newsletter December 2025 History of Media Studies Newsletter December 2025 Welcome to the 55th edition of the History of Media Studies Newsletter. The monthly email, assembled by...

The December History of Media Studies newsletter is out, with updates about the journal, new bibliography additions, and CFPs! buttondown.email/hms/archive/...

Profit, cost, price, learned societies; further thoughts on Samuel A. Moore's Publishing Beyond the Market Since I last wrote, I have had a few more thoughts on Samuel Moore’s book. Again, these are not necessarily things that he does not discuss or things that he...

"we need to conceive of these “publishing beyond the market” enterprises as immanent utopias, spaces that show possibility within a system that they cannot overthrow, but that they can nonetheless structure through critique"

Further thoughts on @samuelmoore.org's book

eve.gd/2025/12/28/p...

Opinion | The Billionaires Have Gone Full Louis XV

"According to the most recent edition of an annual Harris Poll, for the first time, a majority of Americans believe billionaires are a threat to democracy. A remarkable 71% believe there should be a wealth tax. A majority believe there should be a cap on how much wealth a person can accumulate."