From a new, important paper, just published in the Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship:
[…] in scholarly publishing, a small number of companies with market dominance have been able to capture and use the surplus value created through the publishing lifecycle. This extraction—of academic labour, of data, of information—is then reinvested into their proprietary data analytics products, which are repackaged and sold back to universities with the promise of ranking the research output of both individual researchers and the institution as a whole. This is surveillance publishing.
The authors—Danielle Colbert-Lewis, Kelly McElroy, lawrence maminta, Graeme Slaght, and Mark Swartz—are librarians who worked together on a 2023 Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute project. They created, among other things, a scary-cool Elsevier acquisition timeline, and this new paper promises more action and outreach.