Seeing like a mendacious datafied corporation
Jennie Rose Halperin on the bad faith and dishonesty of corporate publishers who deliberately wasted everyone's time in NISO's multi-year attempt to reach a consensus on controlled digital lending as a way everyone in the USA could comply with their copyright act.
One index, two publishers and the global research economy
An interesting historical overview of scholarly publishing and metrics.
It is little wonder that publishers seek to turn the blame on ‘predatory publishers’ or amplify media caricatures of Chinese ‘paper mills’. Fraud and malpractice get portrayed as an existential threat to the integrity of science, rather than the inevitable consequence of unequal resourcing and distorted reward structures.
We’re now delegating the process of creating legibility to technology. Along the way, we’ve made it approximate: legible to someone or something else but not to the person who actually is in charge.
I'm not entirely sure about the conclusion, but this is a nice summary of the present way of being in the industrial world, and to some extent how we go here. It doesn't hurt that it uses one of my favourite books, Seeing like a state, as the framework for thinking.
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