The academic publishing industry is undergoing a major transition, moving from content-provision to a data analytics business. Publishers are selling new products across higher education institutions - including research assessment systems, productivity tools, and online learning management systems. This infrastructure and the data it generates are critical to conducting the end-to-end business of the university. Through ownership of this infrastructure, in the near future, these vendors have the potential to directly influence the evaluation of the teaching and research performance of faculty, determination of funding and staffing allocations among departments, labs, and individual projects, the establishment of priorities for funding bodies and assessment of the performance of students. In the absence of specific actions from institutions to proactively manage these flows of data (and recommendations), the vendors may well end up driving these decisions, and they will also be able to present independent public analyses that may impact institutional rankings and reputations. At SPARC, we have conducted an in-depth analysis of the changes taking place in this infrastructure space and developed a preliminary set of recommendations to help higher education institutions minimize some of the unintended consequences of these changes. In this session we will present a summary of our findings and recommendations in order to galvanize coordinated action, gather feedback, and contribute to the debate that should take place across campuses on these critical issues.
https://sparcopen.org/our-work/landscape-analysis/
