Patrons of the sciences and scholarship may want control of the entire value chain of funding, research, and publication. Is that appropriate?

Criticism and optimism are tightly interlinked. Here are some of the things I hope my criticisms help to cultivate.

An accidental overemphasis on bonds instead of bridges may be behind what has made social media so damaging to people and society.

The poker game of Gold OA (and Plan S) indicates that those pushing economics based on authors and funders don’t know quite how to work the table.

Why is quality a natural pursuit of some business models, but an afterthought or accident for others? Incentives and the dynamics involved. It’s that simple.

Humans dominate the world through gossip. What does scholarly and scientific publishing look like through this handy lens?

Open access, open data, and open science — and even CC-BY — may create more secrets, because nobody will have any power over how data and articles are used in global private enterprise.

Free services are often the most closed, because the user has no leverage to demand anything, and simply must serve the service.

Consolidating economic and social power in a few hands seems to stream from “open” attitudes, facilitating commercial collapse and consolidation, which politicians and authoritarians can exploit.

“Open” eliminates business model options, and seems to be leading scholarly and scientific publishing into an age of patronage, surveillance, and manipulation.

Leadership isn’t lonely or difficult, but it takes focusing on a special set of definite skills, which too many in scholarly and academic publishing lack or suppress.

Transparency may not only lead to misbehavior, but also may hide deeper levels of the game we barely understand or appreciate.

Modern misinformation campaigns largely depend on creating false equivalencies, so that nothing matters because everything matters.

Blockchain’s architecture and philosophy favors the status quo.

Loose talk of disruption continues, despite fundamental societal and economic disruption hurting thousands, with much of it caused by unaccountable technologies. Maybe we should talk about fixing things instead?

There are promises implicit when institutions grant degrees, about the value of these degrees. By not matching production of degrees with hiring practices, they are failing their own students.

We continue to behave as if we have a direct, uninterrupted line to our readers. The problem is that our distributors have become untrustworthy, and have agendas of their own.

What happens when the postman is running a racket while delivering the mail? And becoming a billionaire while doing so?

Anecdotal evidence suggests users are souring on PubMed as a discovery tool. Is it too late for the service to save itself from itself?

Transactional publishing, like transactional culture, is weaker, fleeting, and more constraining than a culture built for long-term value.