the company's more experienced, highly skilled customer support agents saw little or no benefit from using it
If lower-skilled, newer employees can now be as equally effective as higher-skilled and experienced employees, this incentivizes the company to find less experienced hires who they can pay less and to pay less attention to employee retention.
become much more productive
If labor is automated or assisted by automation, that takes a lot of bite out of workers' power to unionize and barter
our living standards
Whose living standards?
First, financial and in-kind contributions are necessary to support efforts that raise awareness of the benefits and affordances of OER, in policy and in the classroom.
Is OER sustained on donated funds and labor? Who is expected to donate funds and labor?
Complicated question. Referring back to a previous line: the sentiment that "it is not enough for individuals to simply take, but also to give back" is tricky here, because the individuals who are truly benefiting from OER are students and learners, and especially those who otherwise would not have the financial means to access educational resources. The people who are takers in this scenario are not (yet) capable of giving back.
sustainably
How are we defining sustainability? Are we focusing on the growth of open educational resource production and access? Or are we also looking at the economic scalability - i.e. how does the OER ecosystem keep authors writing, software companies hosting, and librarians supporting production and distribution by making sure that the folks in those roles are adequately compensated for their labor?
They would find creative ways to weaponize their privilege
Thinking wall of moms.
Accomplices aren’t afraid to engage in uncomfortable/unsettling/challenging debates or discussions.
Makes sense as long as the preceding paragraphs are about engaging in debate and discussion and not in breaking the law, which the article as a whole tends to lean into with the accomplice term. There are lots of reasons a person would want to participate in a movement but wouldn't want to be in a position where they could get arrested. Thinking about non-citizens as a primary example here.
An accomplice as academic would seek ways to leverage resources and material support and/or betray their institution to further liberation struggles.
I read an article recently that I cannot remember the name of, but basically the takeaway was that US higher education institutions have rigged the game of appearing progressive when they really aren't. They have figured out how to tell what the bare minimum compromise is when there's a political movement on their campus, and then they use that as PR to mitigate any ill will.
An intellectual accomplice would strategize with, not for and not be afraid to pick up a hammer.
Author's take is that you cannot change an institution or system from the inside. Not sure it should be that black and white, personally - indigenous publishing in Canada as an example.
think about what you’re doing before you make another community’s struggle into your therapy session
i.e. it's not about you
top ranks in their hierarchy
One thing I've thought about in the past, specifically within the context of publishing open textbooks, is that the folks who are benefited by the movement (poor students who can't afford textbooks) are not generally represented in the movement. Speaking from a background of poverty myself, very few people who I've meet who work in publishing/edtech/OER have ever experienced poverty, and yet they're in charge of solving a problem that most directly impacts folks who are experiencing poverty.
This line kind of reminded me of that. Folks at the top ranks of a movement may be completely detached from the effects of their movement, even if they're coming from a place of genuine compassion.
Defendants were the publishers McGraw Hill, Pearson and Cengage (who together control at least 80 percent of the market for new textbooks)
Feels like this maybe should have been the only fact needed to prove their claim
Let’s tackle those injustices directly instead.
Requesting payment for labor is indeed tackling the injustice directly.
Even if the fee were a mere $100 — significantly lower than others have suggested — this would wipe out the entire surplus of most society publishers. And in so doing, eliminate investment in the society’s research and researchers.
If exploitation of labor is the only way to have a sustainable business than maybe the business is not sustainable
The truth is that payments to reviewers would just lead publishers to raise their prices.
This is the same argument used by people arguing against raising the minimum wage. Faulty at best.
The going rate for expert witness testimony in a court case starts at about $300 per hour — using this rate, a 20 hour review of a long and complex article could then come in at $6000.
Sounds like they're saying "the labor is worth much more than what they're asking for so we might as well give them nothing"
OA is seen to be of significant benefit to LMICs but there is uncertainty and confusion
Summary seems to be: good for students/learners in LMICs, but not good for scholars/authors in LMICs.
a technical and data management feat that would be daunting for the largest of publishers
From the outside, this doesn't seem like an obstacle that's too difficult to overcome; i.e. make the authors figure this out in order to qualify, and standardize this with different organizational levels as much as is possible.
more power to
IMO not a phrase that should ever be used in association with OA
CAP looks at the affiliation of all authors of a paper.
Does this mean all authors have to be members of the program in order for a paper to be published? Or does it qualify if any one of the authors is?
The average cost of an e-book in our sample was $39 higher in 2014 than a print book, and the cost has only risen since then and at a faster rate than the declining real cost of a print book is able to offset.
Single-user only?
STEM the highest
Likely reflects how the STEM field has embraced open access (or, ya know, bypassed closed access)
average cost of an e-book in our sample rose by 35 percent between 2014 and 2017
Whole market or only monographs?
e-book expenditures obtained in the same way experienced a net increase; however, within this sample of books, expenditures for these e-books were not increasing enough to offset the drop in spending on print books
Does this factor in production cost of print books? I.e.: presses should lower production quantity of print books to compensate for the decrease in print sales. E-book sales have a much lower per-unit production cost, so can scale up more efficiently.
345 e-books
Way lower than I anticipated compared to print books. Esp considering space
Also likely to be drastically changed by pandemic circumstances.
GOBI Library Solutions
EBSCO
Editorial Standards and Processes
They only asked this question for editorial and marketing – what I want information on is production. How are presses' processes for production differing between open access titles and non-open access titles? Production takes up a large chunk of the overhead (the "first copy costs" that they mentioned earlier) and if we establish parallels between the open textbook industry and the open monograph industry, lowering production costs is what makes OA feasible to do financially. Considering this report establishes that this is by far the largest concern UPs have about publishing OA content, I'd really like to see expanded research into successful OA programs' production processes.
everal pressesmentioned that CC BY-NC-ND is the most popular among book authors when given an option
Indicates that authors may be reluctant about open access as a whole (or about the sentiment of "giving up their rights" in particular)
Open access is not confined to experimentation with backlist books. Indeed, of the 63 whoresponded that they had published book material open access, 53 report that they hadpublished frontlist “born OA” content.
I'm interested in seeing more data and explanation of the process involved in making already-published content OA. Is this already built into the contract when the book is first published, or have presses altered original contacts to make books open access after the fact? What role does the author usually play in that decision, if so? (Meaning: if a book is made OA after original publication, is it the author that requests that it's made open access, or does the publisher approach the author with the idea?)
“I need to have the biggest valuation I can, because when countries are shooting at each other, I want them to come to me.”
Well, that's terrifying.
Elizabeth took up some needlework
This is an annotation
Ships may be referred to using either feminine forms ("she", "her", "hers") or neuter forms ("it", "its").
Lol I'm dying. Why are ships an exception to this?? Why only ships?
*does not lend to undergraduates from the University of Toronto
Pettttttyyyyyyyy
building up a library which has no other limits than the world itself
So people really have been saying that the library will become obsolete for centuries...
I do hope that, if there should be people of such spirit that they are against the sharing of literature as a common good, they may either burst of envy, become worn out in wretchedness, or hang themselves.
The bulk of these are the classics – works of philosophy and literature. A number of them are love poetry and erotic poetry in Latin. Several are about theology and the Church
Respectable priorities
revolution less in morals, which have remained mostly static, than in means: you could already say “fuck”
Could be argued that there has been a devolution rather than a revolution in morals; that the revolution of means of technology has perpetuated society's capacity and acceptance of wrongness, which in turn has fueled the sort of apathy that made the Trump presidency possible.
self-driving news
The talk of automation and technology that eliminates the role of the human being reminds me of a 1992 article by Steven Katz called "The Ethics of Expediency." Katz argues that the ideology that convinced the Germans during the Holocaust that killing people was okay was an entire rewrite of the cultural definition of the goodness -- that goodness began to be defined by expediency, efficiency, and obedience rather than by respect of human life. Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple now have the authority and sway to subconsciously rewrite the way that people view the market -- to convince consumers that something is good simply because it is faster and newer and not because it has a positive effect on the economy or on the lives of the people effected by it.
Being watched is something we all eventually have to get used to and live with
I don't know if it's the time that has elapsed since the publication of the article or the perspective of the author, but this perspective seems outdated. People no longer get used to surveillance; they embrace it. They buy phones and computers with built in personal assistants like Siri and buy home devices that listen 24/7 to everything people are saying. We give them names.
open web
The article was published in 2013, but this line is perhaps even more salient now in 2018 with the US clamoring over the end of net neutrality.
the Web can perhaps learn how to encapsulate, in the way a book does, a discrete thing, a bounded set of ideas.
I feel like a finite ending is implied in the word "boundedness" that limits the potential of the book on the web. If bound things have defined beginnings and endings, than any bound thing on the internet cannot continue to fluctuate and grow beyond a certain point. I think that especially with the software available now (say, Hypothes.is) that makes it possible for people to have a conversation about a text that then becomes a permanent part of a text's existence, the boundedness of the text gets called into question.
the publisher’s needs are privileged over the reader’s needs.
I'm assuming this is in part to do with the motivation to remain solvent, though? The context here makes it sound as if the publisher's intentions are malicious, but with the current economic models available they're mostly just necessary.