The Conquest of ProQuest and Knowledge Unlatched: How recent mergers are bad for research and the public

In one month, there were two corporate acquisitions involving library services products: Clarivate, a major academic metrics company, bought ProQuest in spite of protests and Federal Trade Commission filings from librarians and advocacy groups, and Wiley bought Knowledge Unlatched, a crowdfunded open access provider. Librarians and researchers have watched dozens of academic journal publishers dwindle to a small, powerful publishing oligopoly that controls the research market. Invest in Open Infrastructures community believes that projects and services serving the open landscape need to be responsive to the research practitioners and knowledge communities they serve, rather than orienting their work solely around profit margins.