This is the fourth in a series of posts about each of the teams that will be attending SCI 2023 and their projects.

“Academic research is meant to be a public good, not a data-collection tool for private data broker companies. Academic research providers should be focused on supplying high-quality academic journals to the public, not on collecting and crunching researchers’ data to make more money.”¹

We would like to explore the use of surveillance technologies in scholarly publishing, with the goal of helping both authors and journals push back against the problematic surveillance practices endemic in the industry.

Scholarly authors, including libraries and the library workers that support them, face an industry dominated by extremely profitable companies determined to extract all possible value from every stage of the research process. These firms are incredibly effective at extracting profits, for example, “Elsevier operates at a 37% reported operating profit margin compared to Springer Nature which operates at a 23% margin.”² For many of these companies, surveillance publishing (or what they call “data analytics”) have become essential tools to aid them in this extraction of value. In the recent book “Data Cartels”, Sarah Lamdan uses the example of Elsevier to demonstrate how “the companies’ millions of academic research materials are ideal data vectors – data analytics companies can put their research databases online and collect tons of personal data about both the people who write the materials and the people who access them.”³

Lamdan notes that these big publishers have been rebranding themselves to emphasise their role as “data analytics brokers”.⁴ Lamdan’s research started with one of the most problematic applications of these strategies: the relationship that two of these major publishers (Relx [Elsevier] and Thomson Reuters) have with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), helping build a massive surveillance network that helped ICE conduct extreme vetting and imprison and deport people “who’d lived in the United States their whole lives.”⁵ The ICE example may be the most egregious, but Lamdan goes on to highlight other examples of this exploitation of author and user data that authors deserve to know.

This brings us to trust…

Scholarly authors trust publishers to be responsible stewards of their intellectual property and personal information. The vast majority of scholarly journal authors publish for free, or at a significant cost in the form of an article processing charge to publish open access (OA), shocking though this is to many readers.

In addition, readers need to trust publishers. Much as scholarly authors may be shocked at the cost to an individual reader to access their articles, they may be shocked that the publisher is collecting data on readers to monetize as part of their data analytics programs.

Publishers effectively launder the trust of authors with that of readers: authors choose journals based on their perceived quality, often based on metrics; readers in turn choose those same journals based on the quality, including based on who publishes there. Understanding data collection of publishers has become an unexpected task both of scholarly authors, and of readers. ACRL’s Information Literacy Framework reminds us that information has value – in this case, we see that even the data created by publishing and reading information has value, in this case as a commodity.

The use of surveillance technologies detracts from trust in scholarly publishing, and authors and readers deserve transparency about how their data is being used. We need to increase awareness of these issues across the scholarly publishing ecosystem and give authors and librarians tools to better advocate on behalf of both author and users. This project would build on the research done by Sarah Lamdan and others, and offer outreach in partnership with the Library Freedom Project.

What are the challenges?

There are a variety of challenges related to both the research we plan on doing and our proposed outputs.

First, the landscape is vast, and scoping our project correctly will help us create useful and effective outputs for both authors and users. Second, determining suitable criteria and standards to use to evaluate publisher practices will be more challenging than with the original scorecard where existing NISO guidelines were used (see “Sharing our Results” below for context). We will need to determine if we can re-purpose the NISO guidelines, or if new criteria will need to be found or created. Third, we will also need to consult with publishers, who would surely say that they are doing their fiduciary duty with regards to this data as the law stands, so there will be an element of negotiation there. Fourth, for the best practices guide, we may need to consult experts outside of the core group in order to build suitable model policies and contracts. Fifth, there are many other groups engaged in this type of work, like SPARC and the Author’s Alliance. We will need to build and strengthen existing relationships to ensure that this work complements and does not overlap with the work that they are doing.

The virtue of bringing together this team together

Libraries, and librarians, are central to supporting the publication process at universities, particularly as it relates to OA publishing. Libraries support scholar-led OA journals and monographs, manage repositories, teach and provide guidance, and help researchers navigate the increasingly complex open publishing environment dominated by APCs and transformative agreements.
Library workers also consider privacy to be one of the core values of the profession, and many academic librarians “identify privacy as foundational to a library’s mission (ALA 2017b)”.⁶ The Library Freedom Project is a network of values-driven librarian-activists taking action together to build information democracy and is the ideal group to do this work. This is why we have selected a diverse group of academic and public librarians, most of whom are Library Freedom Project members, to embark on this work.

Our group includes two librarians who focus on supporting both OA publishing and scholar-led journals, and a number of Library Freedom Project members that represent varied perspectives, backgrounds, and expertise.

Sharing our Results

With that context, we propose the creation of three complementary outputs that will be the result of our participation in the Institute.

The first output will be a scorecard (or something similar) to help authors consider (library values, ethics, etc.) when determining where to publish. One of the most popular initiatives of the LFP has been the vendor privacy scorecard, which examined major library vendor policies and graded them “against a common rubric and practices were denoted as being good privacy practices, areas of concern, or privacy practices that were incompatible with library privacy values”.

We plan to create something similar for a set of major journal publishers, including both the oligopoly publishers and the major OA mega journals, so that authors would be able to determine what journals were the most trustworthy in their stewardship of author intellectual property and corresponding personal data. Consideration will be given to a variety of factors, including: the presence or lack of an author data policy, whether there is any opacity in terms of where author data is shared, and the degree to which authors have some control over the use of their data via opt-ins or or other mechanisms. While the primary audience for the scorecard will be scholarly authors, it also offers a means to assess trust and user tracking more holistically across a given publisher’s practices. Librarians can use this scorecard as they work both with scholarly authors and with researchers – for example, fitting into information literacy instruction under the frame Information Has Value, as noted above.

A corresponding brief will also accompany the scorecard, with contextual information about each category considered. It will also include a set of questions for authors to ask publishers when publishing their work.

The second is a best practices guide for journals and scholarly publishers that wish to resist surveillance capitalism in the publishing process. This guide would help journal publishers create policies and procedures that align with this goal, and may include model contract language. We would also include recommendations for communicating this resistance to users, and detailed guidelines for implementing procedures within journal publishing platforms like OJS and repository platforms like DSpace.

The third will be a paper that includes the methodology used to develop both of the first two outputs. This paper could be published in a journal like the “Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communications” or the “Journal of Copyright in Education and Librarianship”. We will also create a corresponding slide deck that can be used at conferences to share our research.

We see these contributions as supporting individual scholarly authors, journal publishers, and scholarly communications librarians, but in service of addressing more holistic problems within publishing. Because librarians work with authors, readers, and publishers, they make an important secondary audience for these outputs, which we hope will help librarians understand the stakes and what they can do to start to make change.

Membership

• Mark Swartz (he/him) is the Scholarly Publishing Librarian at the Queen’s University Library in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. In this role, he supports OA publishing at the university, including many OA journals, an open monograph press, and an institutional repository. Mark recently completed a 5 year secondment as a Visiting Program Officer with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) where he was engaged in a wide variety of library related policy issues, including privacy, copyright, and online harms/misinformation. Mark is a member of the Library Freedom Project and his passion for open access publishing, fair copyright, and privacy will drive his contributions to the Institute.
• Graeme Slaght (he/him) is the Scholarly Communications and Copyright Outreach Librarian at the University of Toronto Libraries. His work focuses on scholarly publishing literacy and outreach to undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty, and on implementing and advocating for balanced copyright policies and practices. As part of his work in the Scholarly Communications & Copyright Office at U of T, Graeme has been involved in negotiating and assessing e-resource licences, and will bring that experience working with publishers to bear on this project.
• Kelly McElroy (she/her) is the Student Engagement and Community Outreach Librarian and an Associate Professor at Oregon State University. Her work focuses on information literacy and outreach to undergraduates, and she also serves as a liaison librarian in the social sciences. She is a member of the Library Freedom Project, and has worked on privacy outreach and training to students, faculty, and library workers.
• Andrea Puglisi (she/her): A privacy advocate through Library Freedom Project, Andrea’s career in public and academic libraries has focused on the relationship between people and their use of technology and educating communities on the skills needed to safely navigate the digital information landscape. As Digital Initiatives/Technology Librarian at Westfield State University, Andrea is also responsible for their upcoming digital repository, and brings an understanding of the impact of monetized digital information systems on learning, discourse and polarisation.
• Danielle Colbert-Lewis (she/her) is the Head of Research and Instructional Services at the North Carolina Central University (NCCU), James E. Shepard Memorial Library. Librarian expertise includes the following areas: reference, information literacy, utilizing legal resources, First-Year Experience, government documents, institution repository, scholarly communications, and library programming. She is a member of the Library Freedom Project and educates library staff on the importance of privacy.
• lawrence maminta (they/them) is a librarian and definitely not a fugitive from North Long Beach, CA. They do reference and instruction work in community college settings while specializing in protecting users’ personally identifiable information (PII). A few years ago, lawrence conned their way into joining the Library Freedom Project and no one’s been the wiser.

 

Footnotes

1. Sarah Lamdan, Data Cartels: The Companies That Control and Monopolize Our Information (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), 44.
2. Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, “Research Companies: Elsevier,” SPARC: Community Owned Infrastructure, accessed April 25, 2023, https://infrastructure.sparcopen.org/landscape-analysis/elsevier.
3. Lamdan, Data Cartels, 37.
4. Lamdan, 36.
5. Lamdan, 4.
6. Callan Bignoli et al., “Resisting Crisis Surveillance Capitalism in Academic Libraries,” Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship 7 (December 15, 2021): 1–25, https://doi.org/10.33137/cjalrcbu.v7.36450.

Bibliography

• Bignoli, Callan, Sam Buechler, Deborah Caldwell, and Kelly McElroy. “Resisting Crisis Surveillance Capitalism in Academic Libraries.” Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship 7 (December 15, 2021): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.33137/cjalrcbu.v7.36450.
• Coalition, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources. “Research Companies: Elsevier.” SPARC: Community Owned Infrastructure. Accessed April 25, 2023. https://infrastructure.sparcopen.org/landscape-analysis/elsevier.
• Lamdan, Sarah. Data Cartels: The Companies That Control and Monopolize Our Information. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022.

[ Photos by Lianhao Qu and ev used under Unsplash license ]