Critical Accounting for the Hidden Costs of Knowledge Production

"A handful of Western-based for-profit conglomerates dominate the present-day global academic publishing industry. This state of affairs has led to a highly inequitable, exclusionary, exploitative, and opaque system, ultimately enclosing public knowledge by an immensely profitable publishing oligopoly. This is a familiar story we have been hearing for some time. And despite various calls for reform, most notably the Open Access movement, the position of the publishers remains deeply entrenched. In this talk, I tell a story of power, of how corporate publishers have transformed into self-appointed governance bodies over local, national, and global knowledge production. They achieve this by establishing norms, standards, and metrics that confer prestige and enforce compliance on researchers striving for advancement in an intensely commodified and competitive yet artificial "international" market, supported by the mantras of academic capitalism and the globalized knowledge economy.

Taking advantage of the digital turn and network effects, corporate publishers have been building "full-stack" or end-to-end digital platforms, exerting their influence on all aspects of the knowledge life-cyle, or supply chain, from research to publication, data curation, knowledge circulation, and certification. By encoding their profit-driven norms and standards into the very infrastructure that researchers rely on, they wield significant power over academic labour in ways that often go unnoticed but come with real, though poorly recognized costs and harms. These include dependence, epistemic injustice, loss of rights to research, homogenization and reduction of bibliodiversity, and decontextualization of local knowledge systems and traditions.

Through case studies of mergers and acquisitions, including Elsevier, Clarivate, Spring-Nature, and the knowledge cartel they formed, I illustrate how these publishers capitalize on the extraction, collection, and analysis of big data and researcher-generated data traces to create new markets and shape "values" in the form of predictive analytics that researchers and institutions seek to enhance their global rankings—another powerful tool of governance in private hands...."