bordarretazos

“If publishers are happy to let go of access control and copyright, it means that they’ve found something that is even more profitable than selling back to us academics the content that we have produced. And this more profitable something is of course data. Did you notice where all the investment in academic publishing went in the last decade? Did you notice SSRN, Mendeley, Academia.edu, ScienceDirect, research platforms, citation software, manuscript repositories, library systems being bought up by the academic publishing industry? All these platforms and technologies operate on and support open access content, while they generate data on the creation, distribution, and use of knowledge; on individuals, researchers, students, and faculty; on institutions, departments, and programs. They produce data on the performance, on the success and the failure of the whole domain of research and education. This is the data that is being privatized, enclosed, packaged, and sold back to us. (…) Taylorism reached academia. In the name of efficiency, austerity, and transparency,our daily activities are measured, profiled, packaged, and sold to the highest bidder. (…) I strongly believe that information on the self is the foundation of self-determination. We need to have data on how we operate, on what we do in order to know who we are. This is what is being privatized away from the academic community, this is being taken away from us. Radical open access. Not of content, but of the data about ourselves. This is the next challenge.”

Balázs Bodó, “Own Nothing” en Guerrilla Open Access, Coventry: Post Office Press, Rope Press and Memory of the World, 2018, págs. 16-24. Descargable aquí: https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:19826/datastreams/CONTENT/content