Anyone who shares this blog’s concern about the steady drumbeat of consolidation in the research publishing and infrastructure business should run, not walk, to read SPARC’s recent analysis of Elsevier’s Acquisition of Interfolio: Risks and Responses. It’s been out for a couple of weeks, but I’ve been on vacation, so I’m just now getting around to it. If you’re on a similar summer schedule, this report may have passed you by. Since outdated faculty evaluation standards and resulting broken incentives are a root cause of the inertia in our broken scholarly communication system, the acquisition of a key faculty evaluation tool by the leading oligopolist in the system is a Big Red Flag. It’s great that SPARC has its eye on this, and we will look to them for leadership on this issue as it evolves.