Top Publishers Aim To Own The Entire Academic Research Publishing Stack; Here's How To Stop That Happening
from the protocols-not-platforms dept
Techdirt's coverage of open access -- the idea that the fruits of publicly-funded scholarship should be freely available to all -- shows that the results so far have been mixed. On the one hand, many journals have moved to an open access model. On the other, the overall subscription costs for academic institutions have not gone down, and neither have the excessive profit margins of academic publishers. Despite that success in fending off this attempt to re-invent the way academic work is disseminated, publishers want more. In particular, they want more money and more power. In an important new paper, a group of researchers warn that companies now aim to own the entire academic publishing stack:
Over the last decade, the four leading publishing houses have all acquired or developed a range of services aiming to develop vertical integration over the entire scientific process from literature search to data acquisition, analysis, writing, publishing and outreach. User profiles inform the corporations in real time on who is currently working on which problems and where. This information allows them to offer bespoke packaged workflow solutions to institutions. For any institution buying such a workflow package, the risk of vendor lock-in is very real: without any standards, it becomes technically and financially nearly impossible to substitute a chosen service provider with another one. In the best case, this non-substitutability will lead to a practically irreversible fragmentation of research objects and processes as long as a plurality of service providers would be maintained. In the worst case, it will lead to complete dependence of a single, dominant commercial provider.
Commenting on this paper, a post on the MeaseyLab blog calls this "academic capture":
For those of us who have lived through state capture, we felt powerless and could only watch as institutions were plundered. Right now, we are willing participants in the capture of our own academic freedom.
Academic capture: when the institutions' policies are significantly influenced by publishing companies for their profit.
Fortunately, there is a way to counter this growing threat, as the authors of the paper explain: adopt open standards.
To prevent commercial monopolization, to ensure cybersecurity, user/patient privacy, and future development, these standards need to be open, under the governance of the scholarly community. Open standards enable switching from one provider to another, allowing public institutions to develop tender or bidding processes, in which service providers can compete with each other with their services for the scientific workflow.
Techdirt readers will recognize this as exactly the idea that lies at the heart of Mike's influential essay "Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech". Activist and writer Cory Doctorow has also been pushing for the same thing -- what he calls "adversarial interoperability". It seems like an idea whose time has come, not just for academic publishing, but every aspect of today's digital world.
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Filed Under: academic capture, copyright, open access, protocols, publishing, research
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I don't see why, in this age of the global inrernet, such a thing as academic publishers should need to exist at all.
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Top corps DO own the "social media stack"! What about THAT?
They don't share your notions, kids: you're only elegible to be stains on tank treads (as Ratbert once said).
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Top corps DO own the "social media stack"! What about THAT?
They don't share your notions, kids: you're only elegible to be stains on tank treads (as Ratbert once said).
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Can't get into prior piece! But here 'tis.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211001/11502947676/against-content-moderation-concentration-powe r.shtml
Mel Bourne Loch-Doone
If the politicians stay bought, GOOGLE and Facebook will RULE.
As effective Royalty. Just this week, Youtube has Ruled that any "anti-vaccine" info is to be censored. -- It's never concern for The Public that prohibits speech, it's always authoritarian.
Nothing in dense blather above mentions the needed change of status for the mega-corps as "common carriers", at the very least, to establish that they're not to enforce own political agenda.
Comment Held for Moderation...
Thanks for your comment.
It will be reviewed by our staff before it is posted.
Isn't that "ironic" given the title of this piece?
Dozens of attempts to get in, as usual! While pretending to be an authority on internet forums, in fact Maz has to lock out all dissent.
Techdirt is now just pretending to be for "free speech", a few shreds of dirty gauze all that remains.
TD used to be open, but now Maz's true agenda for corporate control of all speech on teh internets are clear, which ran off all reasonable persons.
The lock-out and the few fanboys remaining show how popular are your views. You insignificant academic clowns can natter among only your "safe" fellow travelers, but don't dare let ordinary people have even a say. You're simply WEAK proto-tyrants.
You're also not valued technocrats as believe: to Them you're among the most useless of eaters.
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Re: Can't get into prior piece! But here 'tis.
This technique seems the last way I get in. But it's enough.
And then I can go until obviously an Admin steps in and poisons the IP address...
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Re: Re: still an ignorant motherfucker
Let us all point and laugh at a man who routinely loses to a spam filter.
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Re: Top corps DO own the "social media stack"! What about THAT?
So what.
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Re: Can't get into prior piece! But here 'tis.
ok. flagged for off-topic crank ranting.
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Re: Can't get into prior piece! But here 'tis.
Is it my imagination, or has this doofus gotten even more incoherent over time?
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Re: Re: Can't get into prior piece! But here 'tis.
It's not your imagination.
I have documentation from a study I performed that would prove it, but ... Elsevier.
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Re: Top corps DO own the "social media stack"! What about THAT?
Is there a study to illustrate how dumb you have to be to equate social media posts with academic research, or did Elsevier lock that up too?
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Re: Re: Can't get into prior piece! But here 'tis.
Yes, blueballs went off the rails some time ago, but lately he seems to be trying to earn a Darwin Award.
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On one hand you have a (presumably) off the shelve and easy to use package and on the other a nebulous proposal for open standards. To fend off the former the standards need to be finished yesterday along with the reference implementations.
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Re:
There once was an out of the blue
Who hated the process of due
Each study he'd paid
Was DMCAed
And shoved up his ass with a screw
Keep sucking off the cocks of corporations, blue. Maybe if you do it hard enough someone will write an NTR manga about it.
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Re:
"I don't see why, in this age of the global inrernet, such a thing as academic publishers should need to exist at all."
They dont either, thats why they are trying to get desperate.
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Re: Re: Re: Can't get into prior piece! But here 'tis.
Wow…
Was there a point to that?
The lost one thinks this got lost in translation or something!
I read it twice and still can’t wrap my head around it.
:facepalm:
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Not Very New or Innovative
Schools have been doing the same thing for years with football conferences. You play mainly games in your own conference. Games against non-conference schools do not count so much.
Here, you would have a very small number of ``important'' publishers. Each school picks one publisher silo. Their research is then tailored to their publisher's needs. Their papers cite mainly other papers published by their own publisher, papers published outside of their silo are less important and given less weight.
Properly implemented, it would help prop up the otherwise somewhat obsolete academic publishing companies.
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