If you’re not paying for it, the Silicon Valley adage has it, then you’re the product. Facebook, Google, and Bytedance have to give away their consumer-facing services to attract data-producing users. Products like SciVal and Pure, up the data chain, sell the processed data back to researchers and their employers, in the form of “research intelligence.” Some of its products are, you might say, services with benefits: Mendeley, for example, or even the ScienceDirect journal-delivery platform, provide reference management or journal access for customers and give off behavioral data to Elsevier. Its products span the research lifecycle, from the lab bench through to impact scoring, and even-by way of Pure’s grant-searching tools-back to the bench, to begin anew. Measure researcher performance? SciVal, spun off from Scopus in 2009, which incorporates media monitoring service Newsflo, acquired in 2015.Įlsevier, to repurpose a computer science phrase, is now a fullstack publisher. Want to track your university’s researchers and their work? There’s the Pure “research information management system,” acquired in 2012. Elsevier’s “solutions” for the post-publication phase of the scholarly workflow are anchored by Scopus and its 81 million records.Ĭurious about impact? Plum Analytics, an altmetrics company, acquired in 2017. Posting your working paper or preprint? SSRN and Bepress, 20, respectively.
Citation and data-sharing software? Mendeley, purchased in 2013. Tracking lab results? Elsevier has Hivebench, acquired in 2016. By moving up and down the research lifecycle, the company has positioned itself to harvest behavioral surplus at every stage. Since then, by acquisition and product launch, Elsevier has moved to make good on its self-description. Elsevier, in other words, was to become a surveillance publisher.
The “shorter, more modern name,” RELX explained, is a nod to the company’s “transformation” from publisher to a “technology, content and analytics driven business.” RELX’s strategy? The “organic development of increasingly sophisticated information-based analytics and decisions tools”. In 2015, the firm changed its name to RELX Group, after two decades of acquisitions, divestitures, and product launches-including Scopus in 2004, Elsevier’s answer to ISI’s Web of Science. In 1993 the Dutch publisher merged with Reed International, a UK paper-maker turned media conglomerate. ScienceDirect, its Web-based journal delivery platform. The same year, when the company piloted what would become Maxwell sold Pergamon to Elsevier in 1991, months before his lurid death.Įlsevier was just getting started. Both firms hiked their subscription prices aggressively, making huge profits off the prestige signaling of Garfield’s Journal Impact Factor. Elsevier followed Maxwell’s lead, growing at a rate of 35 titles a year by the late 1970s. By 1965, around the time that Garfield’s Science Citation Index first appeared, Pergamon was publishing 150 journals. Elsevier’s model was Pergamon, the postwar science-publishing venture established by the brash Czech-born Robert Maxwell. The late nineteenth century, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that the firm began to launch and acquire journal titles at a frenzied pace. The Dutch publishing house was founded in I’ll delete the scholarly footnotes here:Ĭonsider Elsevier. Let me quote a bunch!Īfter a general introduction to surveillance capitalism, Pooley turns to “surveillance publishing”. It’s all about what publishers are doing to make money by collecting data on the habits of their readers. Reading about this led me to this article: Them to buy surveillance technology covering the entire workflow that can be used not only to be combined with our private data and sold, but also to make algorithmic (aka ‘evidenceled’) employment decisions.”
“massive over-payment of academic publishers has enabled
0 kommentar(er)
