Metrics and the Commercialization of Open Access Scholarship

• In Event: E/valuative Actions: Exploring the Doings of E/valuation in Evaluative Systems 2

Abstract

In recent years, the ways in which scholarship is evaluated have increased and diversified. New, and often competing, metrics attempt to quantify and value knowledge in particular ways. The expansion of competing metrics may be increasing scientists’ perceived pressure to produce. Open access publication attempts to respond to “pressure” by promising increased scholarly impact while also contributing to the proliferation of metrics, often specific to each platform or repository. While early Latin American open-access platforms such as Brazil’s SciELO—which began in 1997—have, arguably, anti-capitalist or noncommercial origins, open access platforms are becoming commercialized. Corporations like ResearchGate and Academia.edu are privatizing open access on a global scale by transforming repositories into into social networks that capture value from social relations and social metrics. In this presentation, I explore processes of commercialization in open access scientific publication to illuminate how the non-market or anti-capitalist becomes legitimated market-based practice. I will trace changes in moral economies as they relate to emerging regimes of e/valuation as creative and knowledge-based industries shift away from intellectual property and ownership to an economization based on data, metrics, advertising and reputation. By using STS theories to address the relation of social order to knowledge production, this presentation explores changes in the relationship between scientific practice, publishing, and evaluation in transnational contexts.

Author

• Alexandra Sharp Lippman, UCLA