DSHR's Blog: Open Access and Surveillance

lkfitz's bookmarks 2016-11-17

Summary:

"But there is at least one more, less obvious issue. I have written before about the priority of the publishing oligopoly to ensure they control the only easily accessible copy even of open access content, mentioning the value in the Web world of page views. But I didn't sufficiently appreciate where the value came from. It isn't just the visible value of being able to show the reader ads. It is the invisible, but probably greater, value of being able to sell the ability to track their readers' visits to the surveillance companies. Readers of academic, especially STEM, journals are high-priority targets for both commercial and governmental reasons.

Thus it is likely that discussions of various open access models, and the role of institutional repositories (IRs) have misunderstood the business model they sought to disrupt. This insight explains, for example, why Elsevier is so determined that IRs contain only metadata, not actual content, and why buying SSRN was a sound investment. Both enhance Elsevier's value to the panopticons. It would be very interesting to know whether the number of trackers on SSRN has increased since it was purchased."

Link:

http://blog.dshr.org/2016/11/open-access-and-surveillance.html

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) ยป lkfitz's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.privacy oa.copyright oa.legislation oa.publishing oa.ir oa.green oa.metadata oa.ssrn oa.elsevier oa.repositories.disciplinary oa.repositories

Date tagged:

11/17/2016, 16:51

Date published:

11/17/2016, 11:51