RenkeSiemsWährend #Clarivate Journals von #Elsevier auf hold stellt, weil offenbar von Paper Mills durchseucht, ist die Operation Klinkenputzen wieder voll im Schwange, ausgerechnet zum Thema #wissenschaftlichesFehlverhalten. Eine Einführung von echten Experten, da kann man nicht meckern. Aber was denkt man sich da in Dortmund eigentlich?
Björn BrembsAnd here in Germany we have DEAL who seem to think that just putting the word "privacy" in a contract with academic publishers is going to stop them tracking academics 🤣
About two thirds of all EU websites ignore cookie banners and track you anyway:
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec23winter-prepub-107-bouhoula.pdf
jonny (good kind)my next piece will be a listicle called "10 ways #SurveillancePublishing makes Open Science an obsolete concept" except since I am writing it it will actually be 40 things and it will be 200 pages long
listen y'all its the #ScholComm betting hour:
the way it's gonna go down is that one or two of the big 5 academic publishers will diversify out of the business, and then one of them will truly turn their publishing platform into a "platform" where it can defray risks of fraud by claiming it no longer owns the journals and poach editorial staff from other publishers by making reviewing a paid gig economy job where reviewers sign up for the platform rather than editors having to chase them down individually. this publisher will swallow the mid tier academic journals of the others and probably eventually but the flagships out.
this will be absurdly profitable because it unleashes the final form of the APC model, no longer subject to brand penalties from fraud, a wash of garbage journals with $200 APCs that the publisher then sells search and sorting from as a service - no more top tier journals, in order to find anything you'll need the recommendation and personalized search service, which of course locks you into surveillance as well as the logic of their metrics. they will sell this as a "trust" service.
Academics will fall for this and claim it helps open up the "marketplace" of journals since the journals will be "independent" but the real boon is all the data that flows through the platform that can be sold to pharma, oil, etc. companies as research intelligence as well as create a captive audience for selling ads in the form of highly ranked industry research or literally ads that look like papers (which they already sell)
that and the already unfolding plan of selling surveillance data to funders and employers, and swallowing the whole market will explode that.
oooooooo boy i didn't see that #RELX's 2022 annual report has been released. Time for some #HateReading
report: https://www.relx.com/investors/annual-reports/2022
investor presentation: https://www.relx.com/investors/investor-presentations/2023
@neuralreckoning @Samuelmoore
This is why it is absolutely essential to understand the way that #SurveillancePublishing changes the calculus of these questions.
The services Samuel is describing also include mechanisms for ensuring that prestige and other incentives survive any sort of formal efforts to decouple metrics/evaluation/etc. from eg. citation counts. That takes a few forms, including building paper recommendation/'discovery' systems that will systematically favor flagship/higher APC journals, as well as selling surveillance-backed researcher/research evaluation products like SciVal to both researchers and granting agencies alike. The example of South Korea is extremely telling in this regard: https://jon-e.net/infrastructure/#one-more-turn-of-the-screw-the-ability-of-the-former-publishers
The shift from subscriptions to APCs seems subtle, but changes nearly all of the strategic calculations from the prior era. Prestige is operationalized in entirely different ways, as is profit: as Samuel says, we focus a bit too much on the high end of APCs, when the lower end are just as pernicious - reading between the lines of investor calls, and other patterns, a clear business model of generating a smoother prestige gradient to generate maximal price discrimination for work at any 'prestige level,' where the higher volume 'lower tier' journals are an integral part of that model ( https://jon-e.net/infrastructure/#information-capitalism-in-its-terrifying-splendor-here-too-pits ).
So even funders explicitly not relying on traditional prestige metrics wouldn't be enough (to the degree that's even possible, you can't exactly tell people they aren't allowed to care about Nature papers against a strong acculturated backdrop of caring about them) - if they control the recommendation, authoring, and other systems that govern being able to find a paper, as well as selling employee ranking tools based on compliance with their system, the situation looks like much more of a need for a whole-of-infrastructure approach rather than treating publication or even prestige in isolation.
Which is yet another time I find myself doing my steve ballmer chant - "it's the infrastructure, the infrastructure, the infrastructure, the infrastructure"
I think the calculus of #RegisteredReports might have flipped in a #SurveillancePublishing APC-driven #OpenAccess world.
Subscription models meant that a journal could command a high price by being in high demand in a self-reinforcing cycle where since most libraries subscribed to them then they would have high readership, etc. Multiply that by the power of bundling or whatever. Libraries being a conduit could tell who read what and tailor subscriptions accordingly. actual loss of readership could impact subscription cost during negotiations, so null results are less attractive because they command fewer readers and citations and whatnot. publication bias ensues. the classic story.
in an APC world, where the profit is derived from authors willing to directly pay more for the attendant view count and citation, the registered report is instead more like a commitment to pay at some future time to publish. if the prices keep going up, the journal effectively invests in your need to publish as a security.
this is doubly perverse in a surveillance publishing system, where the publishers operate paper recommendation and rating systems linked to funding and employment decisions. in that case, they can just manufacture the view count and citation - and even literal "scientific value score" - as a function of APC price, so null results aren't even a problem since the exclusivity-prestige link is partially dissolved.
I wonder if causes for publication bias could have changed substantially enough that registered reports could backfire as a means of combating publication bias. Since the primary filter is the perceived importance of a piece of work - assuming the authors could pass some competency and design check normal to the field - which is most likely to be at least partially evaluated by the same system of self-fulfilling metrics used in the recommendation/scoring systems for funders and employers, they might directly reinforce hype cycles. couple that again with the prestige gradient model of APC pricing where one publisher owns many Journals at different prestige levels and can bounce you down the ladder to one with a lower but still high APC.
Journals then would then be effectively sorting papers by APC according to the propensity for views/citations, regardless of outcome. It's sort of a combination of payola and security. plz lmk where I'm missing something here bc not just trying to shit on the parade.
Timothy ElfenbeinWhat if the answer is that, yes indeed, university administrators and national research offices are well aware of what they are buying with these services, because they see no problem with surveillance of researchers and faculty? Or with surveillance as an appropriate management tactic in general for populations in need of rule? How would that change our usual narrative of evil publishers vs. unwitting research managers?
@risottobias many if not most of the problems of contemporary academia are rooted in our allegiance to the traditional journal mode of communication, particularly with their evolution into #SurveillancePublishing, and most of our attempts to resolve those problems involve either publishing more journal papers or founding more journals about it.
"Published in journal" does not necessarily imply "uncreative" for all subjects but when thinking about root causes of problems in academia it almost always does (unless it specifically problematizes the notion of journals as such and notes their role in the communicative regime the paper exists in)