A rant about Elsevier Pure | The Ideophone

"Systems like Elsevier Pure are marketed to Research Managers, and every bit of their design shows that. Only a managerial class bent on counting output and measuring productivity is sensitive to marketing speak about “fact-based decision making” and “unlocking your full research potential”. Universities and institutions who use Pure’s “industry-proven data model” to create automated profiles for their researchers are making a big mistake.

Above I wrote how these public-facing histograms invite inferences that may be harmful. Of course that’s pretty much what Pure has been designed to do. Behind the scenes, there’s a plethora of ways to track metrics, targets, and progress right down to individual researchers. Just take the below screenshot from Elsevier’s marketing materials: Pure will help you “achieve performance goals by defining targets and tracking research progress over time”. This is the definition of corporate surveillance, and Elsevier is of course happy to bring it to capitalist neoliberal universities — and in the process insinuate itself into the veins of the system...."