Academic Publishing and Academic Ethos - Looking Back to the Future

KLein, Stefan

Zusammenfassung

Ulrich and I shared an office for five years at GMD’s Cologne Research Center on the Information Economy (1987-1992)[1], which laid the foundation for a lifelong friendship. We both had studied management at the University of Cologne (1978-1983) at a time when seminar theses and punch cards for the COBOL course as part of the IS specialization were written with. We compiled collections of index cards for referencing and abstracting literature and collected folders with copied articles and books. A notorious examination question in the oral IS exam was “how many punch cards fit into this room?”

The historic reflections are obviously subjective and stylized, yet they try to capture the changing sentiments over the past decades as well as persistent issues like the role and ethos of science that are revisited and rearticulated over time. The disciplinary focus is on management, IS and computer science, other disciplines have different research and publication cultures. I use Elsevier as an example to illustrate the impact and risks of digitalization of academic publishing house, or ‘information analytics businesses’ as Elsevier has rebranded itself.

Schlüsselwörter

Academic publishing industry; exploitation; surveillance; corrosion of academic values

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