The Production of Scientific Knowledge and Value in an Era of Platform Capitalism

• In Event: The platformisation of education

Proposal

Scientific and scholarly publishing is experiencing nothing short of a revolution (Muellerleile, 2017). On the one hand, the large global publishing houses, such as Elsevier, Sage and Springer, are both confronting and engaging with the new possibilities afforded by digital technologies (such as platforms, cloud storage, and the computational capabilities of algorithmic tools). Scientific production is also being boosted by its central role as a proxy for developing knowledge economies and as measures of world class universities (Robertson and Olds, 2018). On the other hand, academics are being pressed into being active producers of science, as well as circulators of their scientific knowledge for the purposes of impact as a measure of value. This paper explores two distinct, and at times, contradictory dynamics are at work in this process of producing, circulating and consuming advanced scientific knowledge in an era of platform capitalism (Robertson, 2018). The first dynamic is resulting in the growing concentration and monopolisation of scientific knowledge as the large publishing houses buy up and take over smaller entities and enclose and privatise knowledge sharing and open science initiatives. The second dynamic – where academics actively promote their science – not only produce new forms of engagement with the wider community, but risk of this knowledge being transformed into a commodity. This cat and mouse game, of scientific knowledge production, value creation and enclosure, also risks undermining the very basis of its authority and thus ‘value’.

Author

• Susan Lee Robertson, University of Cambridge