Thread by @punctum_books

HERE WE GO AGAIN. After the recent acquisition of Knowledge Unlatched and Hindawi by Wiley (and remember bepress anyone?!), it is now time for @ubiquitypress to be gobbled by another big for-profit player, De Gruyter for an "undisclosed sum."
thebookseller.com/news/de-gruyte… 1/

It is becoming a pattern that open infrastructure providers are scooped up by for-profit
"data services/analytics" companies (these are no longer "publishers") as they *rightly* perceive that the threat to their ongoing feasting on public subsidies is open infrastructure. 2/

Ubiquity provides services to many OA publishers and journals, and e.g. does a lot of backend work for @openlibhums. Naturally, De Gruyter says that Ubiquity will remain "independent" but we all know how that goes. Such acquisitions threaten core operationality of #OpenAccess 3/

There is only one way to stop these commerical companies from jeopardizing a fully open future of scholarly communications – Open Access, Open Infra, Open Scholarship: by investing in and supporting community-owned, open source, non-profit/public benefit actors 4/

who operate in solidarity and are openly accountable to the communities of scholars they serve.

With @COPIMproject and @ScholarLed this is what we've been saying all along – how many more mergers & acquisitions do you need?!

DIVEST. COLLECTIVIZE. OPEN. 5/5

PS In certain comment threads we already see juicy speculation about whether Springer Nature or Taylor & Francis are going to buy De Gruyter.

Clearly that's where the "priorities" of some are…