Surveillance Publishing

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.  

Surveillance Publishing

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.

Scholarly Publications

This chapter describes the stages of preparing a book proposal and offers practical strategies for dealing with securing a publisher, receiving and responding to feedback, and making revisions. There are three stages typically involved in submitting a book proposal to a scholarly publisher. The first is to overcome one's sense of impostorship, the feeling that books are written by “real” academics with startlingly original things to say. The second is to write the proposal itself. This involves describing the genesis of the idea for the book, establishing a strong rationale as to why the book ought to be published, and summarizing its succinct purpose. The meat of a proposal is the chapter-by-chapter outline that provides a clear description of the book's contents. Proposals typically end with an analysis of competing texts currently on the market, a schedule for writing the book, and indications of how a web presence might be created to support the book. The final stage is to select and then approach a publisher. Through multiple examples drawn from accepted book proposals, this chapter delineates successful, real life ways to manage these challenges and processes.

A matter of distribution: APC logic against consortial funding mechanism

Watch the VIDEO here.Article and Book Processing Charges have become one of the most common mechanisms for paying for gold open access. It is envisaged that this looks like a “flip” from a purchase model to a service model. However, the change in distribution that is effected in such a transition is substantial.In this talk, I will examine the economic distributions of APC mechanisms as opposed to consortial funding. I take examples from the monograph and journal publishing spaces. I also examine the distributional changes from the UK’s Research Excellence Framework’s proposed mandate for monographs. I finally then ask what the actual costs are in running a small scholarly publisher and how the distributional changes implied by APCs – a move from fixed costs to unit costs – hit such entities.In all, this talk aims to provoke discussion about alternative models and mitigating strategies for collectively underwriting open access.

The Open Access Interviews: Sir Timothy Gowers and Clifford Lynch

This is a print version of two interviews I posted on my blog in 2016 as part of a series entitled The Open Access Interviews. The first interview is with Cambridge mathematician Sir Timothy Gowers. In 2012 Gowers called for a boycott of the scholarly publisher Elsevier, and in 2106 he started an overlay journal called Discrete Analysis to demonstrate that a high-quality mathematics journal could be inexpensively produced outside of the traditional academic publishing industry. The second interview is with Clifford Lynch, the director of the Washington-based Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). This interview covers the past, present and possible futures of the Institutional Repository (IR). Both interviews are preceded with a lengthy introduction. I have also included in this booklet my response to some of the comments the interview with Clifford Lynch sparked.

Preparing Book Proposals for Scholarly Publishers

There are three stages typically involved in submitting a book proposal to a scholarly publisher. The first is to overcome one's sense of impostorship, the feeling that books are written by “real” academics with startlingly original things to say. The second is to write the proposal itself. This involves describing the genesis of the idea for the book, establishing a strong rationale as to why the book ought to be published, and summarizing its succinct purpose. The meat of a proposal is the chapter-by-chapter outline that provides a clear description of the book's contents. Proposals typically end with an analysis of competing texts, a schedule for writing the book, and indications of how a Web presence might be created to support the book. The final stage is to select and then approach a publisher. This chapter describes all these stages in detail and provides multiple examples drawn from book proposals that were accepted.