Wissenschaftstracking und Lock-in-Effekt

Overview & Synopsis

International publishers still dominate scholarly publishing during the open access transformation and have extended their reach into additional areas of the research cycle. They increasingly offer applications for research assessment, applications for science management in research institutions and various AI-supported data analysis services. Elsevier in particular has excelled in this area, with applications such as Scopus, Mendeley, Pure and SciVal as well as various data analysis offerings forming an entire ecosystem with the ScienceDirect platform. On the occasion of the DEAL contract between more than 500 research institutions and Elsevier in 2023 and the discussion of science tracking, this thesis examines the question of further cooperation with Elsevier, representative of the other ‘big five’ in the oligopoly of scholarly publishing. I argue that the use of Elsevier’s applications for scientific institutions means the risk of an institutional lockin, which should be seen as a systematic increase in dependencies in publishing. Elsevier’s and RELX’s business model requires an asymmetric distribution of knowledge, including tracking of the entire online behaviour of scientists and students as well as creation of extensive profiles, and is incompatible with academic autonomy and the right to informational self-determination.