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

学术出版业在全球创造了超过190亿英镑的收入，是一个多元化的生态系统，由商业公司、大学出版社和学术团体生产学术研究文章和书籍。它与学院有一种共生关系：出版商依赖于生产研究成果和教学文本的学者的劳动，而学术事业依赖于这种学术的有效传播。这种关系变得越来越令人担忧，批评人士质疑通过公共资助研究的“付费墙”实现的高利润率，也有批评人士呼吁开放获取，以取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，是因为数字化进程减少了(如果不是完全消除)与传统印刷产品相关的材料限制，出版商认为电子格式在经济价值上与传统印刷格式相当，甚至更好。从“印刷优先”到“数字优先”的转变始于学术期刊领域，正是在这一领域，我们最清楚地看到了它的影响，建立了一个支持作者、编辑和读者的数字基础设施。尽管已经落后，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，但也受到持续不断的印刷销售下降的专著危机的推动，这导致许多出版商近年来出版了越来越多的图书，试图从与数量相关的规模经济中获益。Shaw、Phillips和Gutiérrez(2021)报告称，自2015年以来，这一趋势急剧增长，同时图书的电子使用增加，专有数字平台(如牛津在线、剑桥核心、Springer Link)的出现，这些平台将大包捆绑内容直接发送给机构读者，试图绕过根深蒂固的市场中介机构，如书商和批发商，它们侵蚀了出版商的利润。随着行业的变化，图书出版的实践继续与编辑的形象联系在一起，编辑是一个关键的组织参与者，通过把关和创业活动为他们的出版社获取手稿。作为其组织的公众形象，编辑被赋予了比营销和生产/制造等幕后工作人员更高的社会地位，后者被视为不那么强大的服务提供者。然而，尽管该领域的核心编辑职能在数字化时代似乎保持相对不变，但与制作和管理不断扩大的描述性元数据有关的新考虑--摘要和关键字、主题分类、书目属性--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，由于数字化，这些出版物的构思越来越多地与其高度可见的物理形式脱钩。元数据只是最近才被认为是出版商没有完全欣赏的技术，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重要：它们如何扰乱和改变长期确立的编辑做法、组织层级、关于什么是有价值的假设，以及由被认为地位较低的出版商开展的看似平凡的“元数据工作”如何被视为知识生产的重要场所。它的目的是探索元数据如何改变图书的生产、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。

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.