SCIENTIFIC TEXT EDITING UNDER SURVEILLANCE: MAJOR PUBLISHERS AND THE MONETIZATION OF AUTHORS' INFORMATION

Resumen

The world's major academic publishers partially base their business model on the unpaid work of researchers and the sale of derivative products to universities and academic institutions. Thus, the reviewing and editing work of researchers translates into the sale of these products in the form of individual articles or subscriptions at exorbitant prices, often including charges for article processing (APC). This is a lucrative business that major publishers are reluctant to give up. However, another business, perhaps equally or even more profitable, has now been added to their publishing operations: the wealth behind authors' information or data on their behavior contained in the publications they own or control. Major publishers and associated corporations such as Clarivate, Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, SAGE, and others use so-called "predictive analysis" to process scientific production data to analyze the behavior of academics, which they later sell to their clients (and suppliers): the universities themselves. These publishers treat academics much like Google treats all its users: they gather data about their behavior, generating valuable information about their trends, habits, or preferences. Google monetizes this information with various companies that want to sell their products to a targeted audience. Similarly, publishers sell the collected information to universities and government offices involved in scientific policy decision-making. The new business of "predictive analysis" is based on the behavioral data generated by academics. In other words, researchers produce data with each participation in an article or peer-reviewed report. Some of this data is incorporated into the publishers' main products in the form of download counts and article recommendations. Academic publishing is its own emerging surveillance economy. We can describe a publisher as "surveillance-based" if it derives a substantial portion of its income from predictive analysis based on information extracted from researchers' behavior. As Dr. Sarah Lamdan of the City University of New York School of Law said, "Your journals are spying on you."