Regaining control of research assessment. How for-profit companies control scholarly metrics | Reprendre le contrôle de l'évaluation de la recherche. Comment les entreprises à but lucrative contrôlent les indicateurs scientifiques

Regaining control of research assessment How for-profit companies control scholarly metrics Stefanie Haustein uOttawa School of Information Studies (ÉSIS) & ScholCommLab @stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca | ORCID: 0000-0003-0157-1430 CARL Fall Member Meeting, 19 November 2025, Montebello Research Assessment 2 Beigel, F., Brockington, D., Crosetto, P., Derrick, G., Fyfe, A., Barreiro, P. G., Hanson, M. A., Haustein, S., Larivière, V., Noe, C., Pinfield, S., & Wilsdon, J. (2025). The Drain of Scientific Publishing [Preprint]. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2511.04820 Haustein, S. (2025). The Drain of Scientific Publishing Infographic. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17594290 Research Assessment 3 https://clarivate.com/news/clarivate-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2024-results/ The Drain: Control Clarivate 41.5% profit Research Assessment 4 https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/reports/annual-reports/relx-2022-annual-report.pdf The Drain: Control Elsevier’s “research intelligence” pipeline →Products →Scopus →SciVal →Pure →Digital Commons →analytical services →Acquisitions →Mendeley (2013) →Newsflo (2015) →SSRN (2016) →Hivebench (2016) →Plum Analytics (2017) →bepress (2017) →Aries Systems (2018) →Science-Metrix (2018) →SciBite (2020) →Osmosis (2021) →Interfolio (2022) The Drain of Scientific Publishing 5 The alternative publishing models already exist: preprints, diamond journals, S2O, open peer review, publish-review-curate And so do the open infrastructures: OJS, SciELO, Redalyc, Latindex, African Journals Online, Érudit We need to align research assessment with open and community led publishing. Funders and institution must intervene and change incentives and ownership of scientific publishing. We propose that scholarly publishing needs to be re-communalized. Universities, libraries, and funders need to build a system that is community led and managed. Private organizations may provide services but not extract unreasonable profits. Beigel, F., Brockington, D., Crosetto, P., Derrick, G., Fyfe, A., Barreiro, P. G., Hanson, M. A., Haustein, S., Larivière, V., Noe, C., Pinfield, S., & Wilsdon, J.(2025). The Drain of Scientific Publishing [Preprint]. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2511.04820 Haustein, S. (2025). The Drain of Scientific Publishing Infographic. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17594290 Research Assessment 6 What can we do? →13 action items for equitable and sustainable scholarly publishing Haustein, S. (2025). For Equitable and sustainable scholarly publishing | Pour un édition scientifique équitable et pérenne [Checklist]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17419313 Thank you. scholcommlab.ca [email protected]