The Closed-Loop Academic Publication Data Conundrum

"For this presentation we are looking at some of the potential implications of the increasingly closed-loop model of academic publication, student learning platforms, personnel management, and other elements of quantification being developed and sold by an increasingly small number of academic solutions companies. While there are a number of interpretations of these mergers, acquisitions, and ventures, from our perspectives as librarians from two ends of the research apparatus, we see many problems stemming from the increasingly tight connections between the scholarship that is produced, the perceived value of these publications in the market, and impacts on future research funding, student development, faculty positions, and more. We are uneasy, as we will discuss, by the ways in which this constricting pipeline may endanger our shared values in libraries and in higher education more broadly...."