CfA | Publish or perish reloaded | 9th STS Italia Conference - BOLOGNA 28-30 June 2023
Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to invite you to submit abstract proposals to our panel "Publish or perish reloaded: The matrix of contemporary scientific publishing facing institutional research arrangements and the marketization of academic environments " (Panel n. 40 - panel description below) at the 9th STS Italia Conference “Interesting Worlds to come. Science & Technology Studies facing more-than-human challenges”, University of Bologna, Italy, 28-30 June 2023.
Follow this link: https://eventi.unibo.it/stsitalia2023/call-for-abstracts and submit a title, and a short abstract of less than 300 words by January 22nd,
- If you have any questions please email myself at and Federico Neresini
Best wishes,
Stefano Crabu and Federico Neresini
Panel 40
/Publish or perish reloaded: The matrix of contemporary scientific publishing facing institutional research arrangements and the marketization of academic environments/
Organizers: Stefano Crabu; Federico Neresini
University of Padova, Italy
The “publish or perish” (PP) aphorism – with its creeping necropolitics of knowledge – still informs the everyday work of academics. Although it appeared at the beginning of the last century, the PP principle still normatively orients the assessment of academics and researchers on the basis of their success in publishing, with an emphasis on productivity as potentially impacting the innovativeness, significance and social impact of scientific outcomes. Moreover, we can argue that this principle continues to act as a pivotal subjectivation device for the thousands of academic workers from both the Global South and Global North.
Despite its sharp relevance in shaping, reshuffling and igniting research trajectories, the PP phenomenon requires careful analysis. Hence, what now seems urgent and politically exigent is to initiate a lively debate for the purpose of theoretically and analytically grasping the conditions – political, economic, epistemological, institutional and technological – surrounding the culture of contemporary scientific publishing. Academic publishing is indeed a global techno-service industrial complex worth more than USD 19 billion. However, this market is highly concentrated, with few for-profit publishers exercising oligopolistic power in managing academic journals and generating substantial profits for publishers and high costs for public universities (e.g., cost of subscription to scientific journals). Thus, the current political economy of academic publishing potentially compromises the free access to academic scientific knowledge, essentially contradicting the mandate of many public policy schemes. Although digitalization and open access (OA) were intended as liberating forces for academics and research organizations, they appear to have somewhat contributed, alongside key university ranking indicators, to boosting the oligopoly of for-profit academic publishers and translating the digital platform culture within the academic publishing sector.
Within this scenario, it is also important to underline emerging forms of academic piracy, violations of intellectual property rights (e.g., the subject of editor lawsuits against Sci-Hub) and the emergence of “predatory publishers” associated with the potential decline in the academic quality of research. The aim of this track is to explore current scientific publishing practices and the related political, economic, epistemological, institutional and socio-technical arrangements surrounding the PP imperative.
We therefore encourage social scientists, STS scholars, policy scholars as well as practitioners in the academic publishing industry to submit theoretically, empirically and/or methodologically oriented contributions that aim to explore the following:
- The emergence and consolidation of the academic publishing oligopoly;
- Current OA policy implementation and related challenges in the context of the academic publishing oligopoly;
- Emerging forms of “academic piracy”;
- Academic predatory practices;
- The platformization of academic publishing and the use of metric, “alter metric” and scientometric indicators provided by digitalization;
- New business models associated with OA and emerging forms of self-organized open publishing;
- How (digital) citation index databases influence the academic publishing industry and scientific publishing practices;
- Gaps and inequalities between the Global South and Global North in accessing scientific publications and implementing OA policies.
EASST's Eurograd mailing list Eurograd (at) lists.easst.net Unsubscribe or edit subscription options: http://lists.easst.net/listinfo.cgi/eurograd-easst.net
Meet us via https://twitter.com/STSeasst
Report abuses of this list to Eurograd-owner@lists.easst.net
EASST-Eurograd
30 recent messages
- 17/01/2025 Nordics STS Conference 2025. CfAs: The data, the science, and the politics of representing the food system
- 17/01/2025 Call for Abstracts (4S 2025 Seattle) - Humanitarianism and STS
- 17/01/2025 CfA Navigating the Grey: Assemblage Thinking and Digital Artifacts at the STS Italia Conference
- 17/01/2025 CFP STS Italia: Caring for 'care': feminist STS perspectives on researching robots and AI
- 17/01/2025 [10th STS Italia conference] Scholarship prog=?utf-8?q?ram for 10th STS Italia Conference =E2=80=9CTechnoscience for goo?= d”
- 17/01/2025 CfA | At the borders of biomedicine | 10th STS Italia Conference - MILANO 11-13 June 2025
- 17/01/2025 PhD position at ENP (Environmental Policy group) Wageningen University, the Netherlands
- 16/01/2025 REMINDER CfA: Peer Review in the Age of LLMs
- 16/01/2025 CfP: SafeND 2025 Panel T3-5 "Long-term relationships: exploring civil society involvement in repository construction, operation and closure"
- 16/01/2025 CfP: Panel 133 - 4S 2025 in Seattle
- 16/01/2025 Join the Vanguard: Call for Abstracts on Generative AI at 4S Seattle
- 16/01/2025 CFP Neuromedical Configurations: Thinking Through Possibilities of Care, Neglect, and Solidarity
- 16/01/2025 4S 2025 in Seattle WHY YOU SHOULD NOT GO
- 16/01/2025 Call for abstracts for the "Sufficiency and Beyond: Navigating the Middle Way" conference in Oslo on June 23-24
- 16/01/2025 FW: Call for Applications: CSSM grant for seminar exploring human-microbial relations, DL 28.2.2025
- 15/01/2025 CfP: Worlding Digital Health – Invitation to Submit to STS Italia Panel
- 15/01/2025 CfA Deadline Jan 20 | STS Conference Graz 2025 (May 5-7) - Towards Social Studies of (Biomedical) Testing? (Hybrid)
- 15/01/2025 CfA “Data Flow Integration: Investigati=?utf-8?q?ng the =27Good=27 of Interoperability=E2=80=9D panel =2339 at 10t?= h STS Italia Conference
- 14/01/2025 [10th STS Italia Conference "Technoscience for good"] Call for abstracts panel #20 "Good Technoscience for the energy transition?" - Deadline February 3, 2025
- 14/01/2025 CfP STS Graz: Ageing Technofutures-in-the-Making
- 14/01/2025 CfP: Rural Smartification and Digitalization (EUGEO 2025, Vienna)
- 14/01/2025 CfP: 7th Energy & Society Conference
- 14/01/2025 Panel "Artificial Intelligence, Cultural Production and Media Consumption 'for the Good'" - 10th STS Italia Conference - Milano, June 11-13, 2025
- 14/01/2025 postdoctoral position in Paris
- 13/01/2025 Panel on animal intelligences
- 13/01/2025 CfP Technology and Language - Technology and Tragedy
- 13/01/2025 submission call for abstract for eurograd mailing list
- 13/01/2025 Call for abstracts - Social Innovation for addressing challenges in biomedicine and pharmaceutical R&D - STS Conference Graz, Austria, May 5th to 7th, 2025
- 13/01/2025 CfP 4S open panel - The Third Aerospace Revolutio=?utf-8?q?n and Its Reverberations =28Ren=C3=A9 Catal=C3=A1n Hidalgo - Naom?= i Veenhoven)
- 13/01/2025 Re: Call for Abstracts – Panel on STS C=?utf-8?q?onference Graz =22Knowledge Structures and Epistemic Infrastructu?= res" (deadline 20th of January)