What
The chosen article to that we will review and discuss is an essay from The Journal of Electronic Publishing
- Pooley J. Surveillance Publishing The Journal of Electronic Publishing (2022). doi : 10.3998/jep.1874
This essay develops the idea of surveillance publishing, with special attention to the example of Elsevier. A scholarly publisher can be defined as a surveillance publisher if it derives a substantial proportion of its revenue from prediction products, fueled by data extracted from researcher behavior. The essay begins by tracing the Google search engine’s roots in bibliometrics, alongside a history of the citation analysis company that became, in 2016, Clarivate. The essay develops the idea of surveillance publishing by engaging with the work of Shoshana Zuboff, Jathan Sadowski, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, and Aziz Huq. The recent history of Elsevier is traced to describe the company’s research-lifecycle data-harvesting strategy, with the aim to develop and sell prediction products to unviersity and other customers. The essay concludes by considering some of the potential costs of surveillance publishing, as other big commercial publishers increasingly enter the predictive-analytics business. It is likely, I argue, that windfall subscription-and-APC profits in Elsevier’s “legacy” publishing business have financed its decade-long acquisition binge in analytics. The products’ purpose, moreover, is to streamline the top-down assessment and evaluation practices that have taken hold in recent decades. A final concern is that scholars will internalize an analytics mindset, one already encouraged by citation counts and impact factors.
Adam Partridge (Open Research Training Lead / ELIXIR-UK DaSH Fellow at University of Sheffield) will give a brief summary of the article and will open discussion by highlighting some of the points he thought were good/bad about the paper.
Where
This event will be hybrid, if you wish to attend in person we will be meeting in Meeting Room 1 of The Diamond, 32 Leavygreave Road, Sheffield, Broomhall, S3 7RD.
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If you aren’t able to attend in person but would like to join the Journal Club you can do so using Google Meet.
When
2024-01-18 @ 12:00
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