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.
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