In recent years, for-profit scholarly publishers have built a lucrative venture on top of their legacy subscription business. Elsevier, Springer Nature, and the other firms are selling prediction products, fueled by data extracted from researcher behavior—mining, for example, their full-text platforms to sell “research intelligence” software back to universities.

In this Open Access Week talk, Jeff Pooley surveys the rise of surveillance publishing. Since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, the giant publishers have accelerated their push to build new data products from scholarly citations, downloads, and abstracts. 

Jeff Pooley is professor of media & communication at Muhlenberg College and director of mediastudies.press, an open access scholarly publisher.

*Lunch will be provided by Hamilton Whole Foods.

Horizons is a colloquium series featuring a diverse mix of librarians, instructional designers, inventors, scholars, and innovators exploring disciplinary boundaries in teaching, learning, and scholarly communication. This series highlights developments and trendds that will have an impact over the coming years in higher education.

This event is co-sponsored by the University Libraries and ITS Department of Learning and Applied Innovation.