Christian Boomsma, in a nice piece on Elsevier’s data extractivism:
When UG philosopher Titus Stahl is mulling over a new research topic, he has a range of tools available to help him get started. He could use academic search engine Scopus, for example, to point him to articles he could read online or download. He might also take notes using Mendeley, the useful software tool that helps you keep track of sources and references.
If he then writes a grant proposal to get funding, there’s a good chance that the people assessing it use SciVal – software that analyses research trends, but also contains individual researchers’ citation and publication data.
In the meantime, he could discuss his work on SSRN, a social platform used to share and peer-review early-stage research. And ultimately, of course, he’ll publish it in an open access magazine for which the university has paid article processing fees, or APCs, after which others will read it – at home, through their libraries, or again using Scopus.
Then, finally, he will enter his article in Pure, the database the university uses to register all research done at the UG. His profile might change to reflect he has done research on a new topic. Affiliations may be added, since his network has changed too, so everyone can see who he collaborates with and what his strengths are.
It’s all very streamlined and it all works beautifully. However, it doesn’t seem all that great anymore when you realise that every tool Stahl has been using, every platform on which he publishes, is owned by publishing mogul Elsevier. And Elsevier not only provides tools, it also collects user data. It logs everything Stahl does, every keystroke.
The piece mentions the LLM-training revenue that, I claim in a recent article, is a second wave of surveillance publishing.