Just a quick post.

I happened to see @wisealic Tweet about her “new Atira/Pure colleagues” yesterday. I didn’t know what Atira was, but I’d heard of PURE.

I googled it to find out more… and soon found the official Elsevier press release , dated August 15, 2012 (so this isn’t really new news). But combined with recent rumours it does worry me. Elsevier own perhaps a fifth of the academic literature, whatever the true figure it’s a significant share. Despite the research that went into most of those papers being publicly or charitably-funded, Elsevier now rent access to this work back to us (the world) for vast sums of money each and every year.

Not to mention the fake journals they published, the arms dealings their parent company (Reed Elsevier) was involved in, their initial support for the RWA (since withdrawn), the megabundling of journals, the non-provision of open bibliographic metadata (even NPG release this!), the obscene profit margins (and to be fair they’re not the only corporate publisher making a killing here by selling freely provided academic work),  there are 1001 reasons why –  this isn’t an exhaustive list of all the evils…

So Elsevier are not a well-loved company in academia at the moment – more than 13,000 people have signed a boycott of them.

There are rumours that Elsevier are in talks to buy Mendeley at the moment. And Atira/PURE now part of the Elsevier (Umbrella?) corporation are I think the exclusive(?) providers of the research information ‘management’ systems that the UK will be using for it’s next Research Evaluation Framework (REF formerly RAE) exercise in 2014.

So… Elsevier own a significant portion of our papers,  and they may soon own a significant chunk of the bibliographic metadata stored by academics (Mendeley data) and all the commercial insight and advantage that gives, AND they own the company that is managing the data that evaluates UK academics and more round the world no doubt.

I do wonder if there isn’t a significant conflict of interest if thousands of UK academics have publicly boycotted Elsevier and now their academic work is going to be evaluated by… Elsevier. Academic jobs thoroughly depend on the results of these evaluations as I understand it, and heads will roll if the results at an institution are below expectations.

From a purely business perspective many financial analysts would rightly applaud these acquisitions as “good business moves” (good for profits no doubt). But from an ethical standpoint? Elsevier now seem to have a worrying empire of services built around academia and a significant amount of data which presumably they can pool together from each of these different services to gain additional insight? They also have a very poor record when it comes to providing open data. Why are we still giving them our data so easily – they’re only going to rent it back to us at a later date?

To me it’s clear, we’re giving up far too much of our data to this company and they do not have our best interests at heart – shareholder profits are by definition their primary goal. They have a sizeable monopoly on academic data in all it’s forms which they can and do leverage and I suspect we’re going to be made to pay for this mistake in the future as we have with hugely inflated journal subscription prices.

Is it just me that’s worried?