scholarly journals Surveillance Publishing

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jefferson Pooley

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 point is to show the co-evolution of scholarly communication and the surveillance advertising economy. The essay then refines 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 universities 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 mark. 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, with the implication that university customers are budgetary victims twice over. The products’ purpose, I stress, is to streamline the top-down assessment and evaluation practices that have taken hold in recent decades, in tandem with the view that the university’s main purpose is to grow regional and national economies. A final pair of concerns is that publishers’ prediction projects may camouflage and perpetuate existing biases in the system—and that scholars may internalize an analytics mindset, one already encouraged by citation counts and impact factors.

Author(s):  
Jeff Pooley

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.  


Author(s):  
Markus Wust

This qualitative study investigates how faculty gather information for teaching and research and their opinions on open access approaches to scholarly communication. Despite generally favorable reactions, a perceived lack of peer review and impact factors were among the most common reasons for not publishing through open-access forums.Cette étude qualitative examine comment les membres du corps professoral recueillent l’information pour l’enseignement et la recherche, et leurs opinions envers les approches de la communication scientifique à libre accès. Malgré des réactions généralement favorables, le manque perçu de révision par les pairs et les facteurs d’impact comptent parmi les motifs habituellement évoqués pour ne pas publier sur ces tribunes à libre accès. 


2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942098684
Author(s):  
Adam Hjorthén

This article examines the history of ancestral tourism and its development as a form of cultural diplomacy between 1945 and 1966. The phenomenon often referred to as ‘roots tourism’ has during the last decades increased in popularity, especially in Old World countries that historically have sent large numbers of people to North America. While previous scholarship has focused on its existential dimensions and its relation to the twenty-first century tourism and heritage economies, this article looks at how ancestral tourism grew out of European attempts at expanding the tourism industry after 1945. It studies the international spread of ‘person-to-person’ programs that sought to turn travelers into ‘ambassadors’, and the subsequent transformation of such initiatives into ‘homecoming’ campaigns through notions of co-descent, targeting Americans of European descent. By exploring the case of the 1966 Homecoming Year campaign in Sweden, the article shows that the attraction of ancestral tourism was grounded in its ability to combine economic and political incentives articulated in the Marshall Plan. It developed out of a liberal-democratic ideology that vested individual travelers with diplomatic agency. In the process, European tourist agencies calcified the notion that ancestral tourism served not only individual experiences, but also national economies and international relations.


2009 ◽  
Vol 39 (12) ◽  
pp. 1935-1941 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. S. Kendler

This essay, which seeks to provide an historical framework for our efforts to develop a scientific psychiatric nosology, begins by reviewing the classificatory approaches that arose in the early history of biological taxonomy. Initial attempts at species definition used top-down approaches advocated by experts and based on a few essential features of the organism chosena priori. This approach was subsequently rejected on both conceptual and practical grounds and replaced by bottom-up approaches making use of a much wider array of features. Multiple parallels exist between the beginnings of biological taxonomy and psychiatric nosology. Like biological taxonomy, psychiatric nosology largely began with ‘expert’ classifications, typically influenced by a few essential features, articulated by one or more great 19th-century diagnosticians. Like biology, psychiatry is struggling toward more soundly based bottom-up approaches using diverse illness characteristics. The underemphasized historically contingent nature of our current psychiatric classification is illustrated by recounting the history of how ‘Schneiderian’ symptoms of schizophrenia entered into DSM-III. Given these historical contingencies, it is vital that our psychiatric nosologic enterprise be cumulative. This can be best achieved through a process of epistemic iteration. If we can develop a stable consensus in our theoretical orientation toward psychiatric illness, we can apply this approach, which has one crucial virtue. Regardless of the starting point, if each iteration (or revision) improves the performance of the nosology, the eventual success of the nosologic process, to optimally reflect the complex reality of psychiatric illness, is assured.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mari Adachi

In Indonesia, zakat management was trying restructured in a top-down form based on the system followed in Malaysia and, in 1999, a related law was enacted. Although many previous studies have been conducted on zakat for its fundamental spiritual aspects and social roles, macroscopic research on its history of both theory and practice aspects is lacking. The transformation in the administrative reform of zakat, which focuses on not only the discourse of Islamic intellectuals but also the tone of the emerging Islamic economy and attitude of the management organization's practitioners and players, is important to understand the growth of Islam in Indonesia. This paper discusses how the zakat practice, which was an individual practice, expanded to include new objectives such as community development or financial inclusion without losing its original spiritual significance. Further, the paper clarifies how an institutionalized approach to zakat management helps in the development of new theoretical intervention areas and contributes to community development and empowerment, without compromising the original poverty alleviation programs. Keywords: Zakat management, Indonesia, Islamic economics


Author(s):  
Sergey S. Naumov ◽  
Dmitry I. Petin

The article presents a previously understudied regional history aspect related to the origin, development and everyday life of the 16th Military Town in Omsk. It reveals the relation of the issue to the historiography of the problem on the scale of Siberian region. The objective of the research is to study the history of the 16th Military Town in Omsk by solving compound tasks. The authors analyse the microdistrict construction stages, reveal the main impact factors; study the military disposition within the microdistrict with regard to the local history. The research is based on a number of sources (previously unpublished documents from the Historical Archive of the Omsk Region and reference books) to restore the different stages of the Military Town history and construction, as well as the military disposition within the district as much as possible. The provided data form the foundation for a conclusion on the uniqueness of the 16th Military Town as a historical and cultural space of the urban environment from the perspective of history and culture studies


Author(s):  
Adam Crymble

After nearly a decade of scholars trying to define digital work, this book makes the case for a need instead to understand the history of technology’s relationship with historical studies. It does so through a series of case studies that show some of the many ways that technology and historians have come together around the world and over the decades. Often left out of the historiography, the digital age has been transformative for historians, touching on research agendas, approaches to teaching and learning, scholarly communication, and the nature of the archive itself. Bringing together histories and philosophies of the field, with a genre of works including private papers, Web archives, social media, and oral histories, this book lets the reader see the digital traces of the field as it developed. Importantly, it separates issues relevant to historians from activities under the purview of the much broader ‘digital humanities’ movement, in which historians’ voices are often drowned out by louder and more numerous literary scholars. To allow for flexible reading, each chapter tackles the history of a specific key theme, from research, to communication, to teaching. It argues that only by knowing their field’s own past can historians put technology to its best uses in the future.


Author(s):  
Frank C. Beall ◽  
Henrique Reis

The use of ultrasonic techniques to evaluate the properties of engineered wood-based materials is discussed with respect to research to date and the use of more advanced techniques. The latter is critical because of the rapid evolution from solid wood to reconstituted structural materials. In addition, although considerable research has been done, there have been few introductions into manufacturing. This chapter traces the history of the use and latest developments of ultrasonics in several key areas, particularly the measurement of adhesive curing and quality in composites and laminates, and detection of flaws in solid wood materials. The techniques reviewed apply to product development, material properties, process control, product quality assessment, and evaluation of products in service.


Author(s):  
G. Saroja

Scholarly communication involves publishing the research findings by academics and researchers in order to share and make available the academic or research output to the global community of researchers. Emergence of Internet and World Wide Web has brought revolutionary changes in the process of scholarly communication. Increasing price of serial publications, time lag in the publication and readership and other associated problems were addressed by the electronic journals and open access initiatives. Other models like – Consortia and Institutional Repositories have evolved as a cost saving models and improving communication. The social networking sites on the Internet are also promoting scholarly communication to a great extent. In the light of the changing technological environment this chapter depicts the history of scholarly publishing and reviews the changes that took place in the process of scholarly communication. Further, the impact of the changing models on Library and Information Centres (LICs) is examined.


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