Publons: academic peer-review as raw material for surveillance capitalism

In recent months Publons has become more present in the academic environment. I received a number of notifications from academic journals saying that my peer-review history has been added to Publons. Also, in recent invitations to review, there was a statement by the jornal saying that by agreeing to review the manuscript, I was also agreeing to have my report added to Publons, with the choice of it being anonymous. What is Publons, and why they want to have control of my peer-review record?

According to their website, Publons is a service that “track[s] your publications, citation metrics, peer reviews, and journal editing work in a single, easy-to-maintain profile.” It is part of Clarivate, a data analytics corporation that sells analyses and data products to organizations. The raw material for this products is scientific output. Therefore, Publons wants not only my peer-review record, but also my entire scientific output to develop products for a profit.

Academic work in the age of surveillance capitalism

Publons has been around since 2012, but it was not so uncomfortably present as after reading Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, a book that is a masterpiece on the analysis and critique of the current threats from the misuse of artificial intelligence in the digital age to a free and democratic society. One of Zuboff’s main arguments is that human experience is now used as raw material by companies such as Google and Facebook to develop prediction products that are sold for profit to other companies. The value of these products depends largely on their ability to effectively predict human behavior, therefore surveillance capitalism preys on our freedom of will. Better predictions can be achieved by behavioral control that erodes our ability to freely decide what we want to buy, how do we want to entertain ourselves in our free time, and what we value as human beings. Surveillance Capitalism, as described by Zuboff, is nothing less than a threat to human nature.

There are a number of private corporations that make profit from scientific activities such as publishers and laboratory suppliers. However, there is an increasing number of companies related to science that in my opinion are true surveillance capitalists, ResearchGate and Publons are popular examples. I do not have a ResearchGate profile and do not use the site, so I will not say much about them here.

I do have a Publons profile, which was created automatically by the company taking my previous Researcher ID profile after Thompson Reuters was acquired by Clarivate. I do not know how this happened, and whether I agreed at some point to have my information being transferred to this new service. I also do not recall giving permission to Publons to take information about reviews I wrote for different journals. I was notified, but I was never asked for permission.

However, the question that I ask myself is, what does Publons do with this information? How do they manage to take dry text with scientific comments, opinions and recommendations for other scientist’s manuscript, and make financial profit out of it? How is it that peer-review reports become now raw material for surveillance capitalists?

I think we scientist have a right to know, and should demand Publons to be accountable for the use of our review reports. We write peer-review reports as a service to our scientific communities with the aim to keep the integrity of science. We do not charge money for this service, even though scientific journals benefit from this work. How is it that now this academic service becomes raw material for financial profit?

Surveillance capitalism as a thread to academic freedom

The main issue with Publons, and other surveillance capitalists like ResearchGate and Google Scholar, is not just the vulgar collection of behavioral data for financial profit. Academic freedom is at stake.

Our academic work is now constantly under surveillance by companies that track how many articles we publish, what articles do we cite, who are our co-authors and from where are they, how many citations do we get for each publication, what institution funded our work. Publons adds now a new layer of surveillance by tracking our review reports. These companies are now building a panopticon around the scientific community. As Jeremy Bentham postulated with his idea of the panopticon, the utilitarian value of constant surveillance is on behavioral modification.

By being constantly observed in our academic work, we are already changing our behavior to increase our h-index, RG score (ResearchGates’s metric to measure ‘scientific reputation’), or the Altimetric score that measures the popularity of articles on the web. A next step in behavioral modification would be in scientists choosing scientific topics, subjects of study, and particular results with the only intention to modify these scores. Some may argue that this is actually good to increase the value and attention to science from the general public, but it has the fundamental problem that is designed by a small elite of entrepreneurs who decide what the metrics are. This elite has the power to decide (or design) what science should be concerned about, taking away freedom from scientists.

Unfortunately, nobody seems to be worry about this situation. On the contrary, science founders, evaluators, science communicators, and almost everyone involved with science seem to be completely happy with this state of surveillance. Furthermore, surveillance capitalism prospers on our eagerness to use their products. Those of us who do not like it or feel uncomfortable, cannot do much about it either. For example, I was recently asked to provide a link to my Google Scholar profile for an application to a faculty job, therefore I cannot simply delete this profile because I am expected to have one. Surveillance in science is increasingly becoming ubiquitous, and there is no place to hide.

Surveillance capitalism in science is uncomfortable and scary.