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.

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.

Aileen Fyfe, in a delightful, fittingly brief history of the abstract [paywalled, alas]:

Many scientists will recognize the sentiment expressed by Royal Society president William H. Bragg in the 1930s: it is vital to have well-written abstracts that can be understood by a “wider circle of readers” (not only experts), yet such abstracts can be “more difficult to write than the paper itself.” Today, such sentiments might generate interest in the possibility of removing this burden from scientists by training large language models to produce summaries of scientific work. In Bragg’s day, the discussion was about whether asking scientists to produce their own abstracts would speed up scientific communication, since it would reduce reliance on labour-intensive abstracting and summarizing services. This is one instance of how the format and function of abstracts have changed over their history, in response to changes in the technologies and practices of scientific publishing.

The author-written abstract took hold only after World War II—like so much else (the good and the bad) we take as ever-thus in scholarly publishing.

Ithaka’s Roger C. Schonfeld, announcing a an AI licensing-deal tracker on The Scholarly Kitchen:

In recent months, several publishers have announced that they are licensing their scholarly content for use as training data for LLMs (Large Language Models). These deals illuminate how major publishers are grappling with their strategy amid uncertainty, but thus far they have been unavailable to smaller and medium size publishers. To understand the dynamics around this fast-developing market, my colleagues Maya Dayan and Dylan Ruediger and I are launching a tracker of these licensing deals. 

It’s a useful service, the tracking, but the piece introducing it—in line with Schonfeld’s general approach—is to write like a publishing-industry analyst (who’s up, who’s down?), rather than as a representative of the university knowledge-sharing community that Ithaka S+R serves. It’s bizarre.

Earlier this month the inestimable SPARC team released the second installment in its important report series on big-publisher extractivism:

Today, SPARC released our second vendor privacy analysis: Navigating Risk in Vendor Data Privacy Practices: An Analysis of Springer Nature’s SpringerLink. Produced in collaboration with Becky Yoose of LDH Consulting Services, this analysis builds on our ScienceDirect report published last year and documents a variety of practices that undermine library privacy standards.

From the SPARC blog post:

SpringerLink provides a case study in the encroachment of the broader surveillance-based data brokering economy into academic systems. Among other findings, the report documents risks related to the 200 named third parties that are allowed to collect information from users of the site (along with what appear to be additional unlisted companies found only in our public website analysis). While the specific privacy concerns posed by SpringerLink are different, our analysis reiterates the findings from our ScienceDirect report: that user tracking that would be unthinkable in a physical library setting now happens routinely through publisher platforms.

The SpringerLink study, together with its Elsevier ScienceDirect predecessor, are indispensable investigations—they provide empirical ballast to the growing movement to stop rampant surveillance publishing among the oligopolist firms.

Gary Hall, the relentlessly curious and provocative thinker, academic, and publisher, posted a thoughtful Mastodon thread on my recent essay for Culture Machine on “Before Progress. On the Power of Utopian Thinking for Open Access Publishing”—appearing in the “Publishing After Progress” issue edited by Rebekka Kiesewetter. From Hall’s thread:

I’ll just speak to some of the radical OA publishing projects I’m associated with: Culture Machine, Open Humanities Press, Radical Open Access Collective, COPIM … But my experience is that, to recast Pooley’s words in ‘Before Progress’, scaling small does believe a ‘viable alternative’ system to the extractivism of the oligopolists is possible (contrary to Richard Poynder’s impression of it), and so does have an aspect of utopianism.

Their scaling small aspect, being an ethico-political stance, is not indicative of a retreat from such a progressive political vision of something better: it is the political vision. It’s just that the emphasis on diversity means the politics of scaling small is better understood less in terms of universalism and perhaps more in terms of something like pluriveralism, in the sense of the anticapitalist, antiracist, antiheteropatriarchal politics of certain Latin American activists and theorists.

In my replies, I conceded Gary’s core point about how ‘scaling small’ is compatible with utopian thinking (and practice)—with some self-doubt about whether my qualified claim about a retreat-from-exhaustion about thinking and talking big in the radical OA world was right.