Thread by @brembs

With Elsevier's @paul_abrahams stating a rejection rate over all Elsevier journals of ~77%,

https://twitter.com/paul_abrahams/status/1440693917872123906

we can use this figure to calculate Elsevier's publishing costs using the available market rates for publishing services:
f1000research.com/articles/10-20…
1/12

Assuming Elsevier publishes at least as efficiently as the companies that are on the record with such costs, the figure comes to lie at US$574.74 per article (in our scenario B), i.e., very close to the estimated average per-article publishing costs for the industry:

2/12

If Elsevier's revenue per article also were to clock in at the industry-average of around US$4,000, then each article would provide Elsevier with about US$1,200 in profits, given their posted profit margins of just above 30%.
3/12

If our industry-average calculations really were to match the numbers of industry giant Elsevier that well, one may wonder what Elsevier is doing with the remaining US$2,200 per article that go neither towards publishing nor towards profits?
4/12

For clues, one may look at Elsevier's tweet from yesterday:

https://twitter.com/ElsevierConnect/status/1440632982990049297

"knowledge and analytics" is what they do today - *publishing* is only mentioned as their "roots" in the past, not something that is relevant today or, let alone, in the future.
5/12

The link Elsevier promotes in that tweet points to a page on their own site where is says: " Elsevier has really positioned itself as a data science company" and Elsevier adds right below it: "evidence-led decisions"
What kind of decisions, you may ask? We'll come to that.
6/12

The acquisitions of Elsevier parent company RELX confirm this transition to data analytics and data-based decisions:
knowledgegap.org/index.php/sub-…
For 20 years now, they have invested in data analytics. But what kind of data are they analyzing and for which decisions?
7/12

Funny you should ask: they are analyzing your data of course!
Here is a graph that shows what Elsevier has been buying over these last two decades when you (like me) may have been too busy fighting for #openaccess to pay attention (grey box denotes just publishing):
8/12

Whenever you interact with any of these tools, your user data is being collected and analyzed by Elsevier. After all, this is their core business, as they sate. Elsevier's parent RELX is one of the largest data brokers on the planet and owns, among others, Lexis Nexis.
9/12

This means that RELX can now combine your professional data with your private data and sell it. For instance, Lexis Nexis is selling their data to law enforcement agencies that are not allowed to collect such data themselves:
theintercept.com/2021/04/02/ice…
10/12

On the upside, if you are a dean or provost, you can now license products that can use all of these data on your faculty to automate the classification of your faculty in "productive", "average" or "underperforming":
crackedlabs.org/daten-arbeitsp…
netzpolitik.org/2021/studie-wi…
(German)
11/12

ti;dr: Massive over-payment of academic publishers has enabled them to buy surveillance technology covering the entire workflow that can be used not only to be combined with our private data and sold, but also to make algorithmic (aka. "evidence-led") employment decisions.
12/12

Now also as referenced blog post:
bjoern.brembs.net/2021/09/algori…