Markets and Metadata: Exploring the sociology of academic publishing in the digital era

市场和元数据：探索数字时代学术出版的社会学

• 批准号: 2711746
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Bristol
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2711746
• 关键词: Markets; Metadata; Exploring; sociology; academic

Generating revenues of more than £19bn globally, the academic publishing industry is a diverse ecology of commercial firms, university presses and learned societies producing scholarly research articles and books. It has a symbiotic relationship with the academy: publishers depend on the labour of scholars who produce research outputs and pedagogical texts, while academic careers rely upon the efficient dissemination of that scholarship. The relationship is increasingly fraught, with critics questioning high profit margins that are achieved through the 'paywalling' of publicly-funded research and those same critics calling for open access alternatives to the profit-driven publishing model. This turn towards open access is made possible by-is a possible consequence of-a process of digitalisation that has reduced (if not entirely eliminated) the material constraints associated with traditional printed outputs, and where electronic formats are considered by publishers to be equivalent in economic value, or even superior to, their 'legacy' printed counterparts. This transition from 'print-first' to 'digital-first' began in the scholarly journals field and it is here that we see its impact most clearly, with a digital infrastructure created to support authors, editors and readers. Although it has lagged behind, the academic book publishing field is undergoing its own process of digitalisation, driven in part by changing reading habits and the widespread adoption of electronic reading technologies, but also by an ongoing 'monograph crisis' of declining print sales which has led many publishers in recent years to produce ever greater numbers of books in an attempt to benefit from the economies of scale that are associated with volume. Shaw, Phillips and Gutiérrez (2021) report that this trend has increased dramatically since 2015, coinciding with increased electronic usage of books and the emergence of proprietary digital platforms (e.g., Oxford Scholarship Online, Cambridge Core, Springer Link) that deliver large packages of bundled content direct to institutional readers in an attempt to bypass entrenched market intermediaries like booksellers and wholesalers who erode publishers' profits. As the industry changes, the practice of book publishing continues to be associated with the figure of editor, a key organisational actor who acquires manuscripts for their press through gate-keeping and entrepreneurial activities. As the public face of their organisation, the editor is accorded a higher social status than 'back room' staff such as marketing and production/manufacturing who are viewed as less powerful service providers. However, while the core editorial function of the field appears to remain relatively unchanged by the digital turn, new considerations relating to the production and management of an ever-expanding universe of descriptive metadata-abstracts and keywords, subject classifications, bibliographic properties-have become profound matters for publishers and other market participants who are dealing with ever-larger volumes of publications that, by virtue of digitalisation, are increasingly conceived in ways that are decoupled from their highly visible, physical forms. Where metadata were only recently thought of as technologies that publishers did not fully appreciate, they have become imbued with urgency and importance. This research will explore how and why metadata matters to the market: how they are unsettling and transforming long-established editorial practices, organisational hierarchies, assumptions about what is valued, and how the seemingly mundane 'metadata work' carried out by supposedly low-status publishing actors can be considered an important site of knowledge production. It aims to explore how metadata are changing how books are produced, consumed and even imagined, and to consider the consequences for researchers, publishers, policy-makers and funders.

学术出版行业在全球创造了超过190亿英镑的收入，是一个由商业公司、大学出版社和学术团体组成的多元化生态系统，生产学术研究文章和书籍。它与学术界有着一种共生关系：出版商依赖于产生研究成果和教学文本的学者的劳动，而学术事业则依赖于学术成果的有效传播。这种关系越来越令人担忧，批评者质疑通过公共资助研究的“付费墙”实现的高利润率，而这些批评者呼吁开放获取替代利润驱动的出版模式。这种向开放获取的转变之所以成为可能，可能是由于数字化进程减少了（如果不是完全消除的话）与传统印刷输出相关的材料限制，并且出版商认为电子格式在经济价值上与传统印刷版本相当，甚至优于传统印刷版本。这种从“印刷优先”到“数字优先”的转变始于学术期刊领域，我们在这里最清楚地看到了它的影响，创建了一个数字基础设施来支持作者、编辑和读者。虽然落后，但学术图书出版领域正在经历自己的数字化进程，部分原因是阅读习惯的改变和电子阅读技术的广泛采用，但也受到印刷版销量下降的持续“专著危机”的推动，这导致近年来许多出版商出版了越来越多的书籍，试图从与数量相关的规模经济中获益。Shaw， Phillips和gutisamurez（2021）报告称，自2015年以来，这一趋势急剧增加，与图书电子使用的增加和专利数字平台的出现（例如，Oxford Scholarship Online, Cambridge Core， b施普林格Link）相吻合，这些平台直接向机构读者提供大量捆绑内容，试图绕过根深蒂固的市场中介，如书商和批发商，这些中介会侵蚀出版商的利润。随着行业的变化，图书出版的实践仍然与编辑的形象联系在一起，编辑是一个关键的组织角色，通过把关和创业活动为出版社获取手稿。作为组织的公众形象，编辑被赋予了比“幕后”员工更高的社会地位，如营销和生产/制造人员，他们被视为权力较小的服务提供者。然而，虽然该领域的核心编辑功能似乎在数字化转型中保持相对不变，但与不断扩大的描述性元数据（摘要和关键词、主题分类、书目属性）的生产和管理有关的新考虑，已经成为出版商和其他市场参与者的深刻问题，他们正在处理越来越多的出版物，这些出版物，由于数字化，越来越多地以与它们高度可见的物理形式分离的方式构思。元数据直到最近才被认为是一种出版商并不完全欣赏的技术，但它们已经变得紧迫和重要。这项研究将探索元数据如何以及为什么对市场产生影响：它们如何扰乱和改变长期建立的编辑实践、组织等级、关于什么是有价值的假设，以及由被认为地位低下的出版行动者执行的看似平凡的“元数据工作”如何被认为是知识生产的重要场所。它旨在探索元数据如何改变书籍的生产、消费甚至想象方式，并考虑对研究人员、出版商、政策制定者和资助者的影响。