Platform capture of scientific knowledge production: publishers’ dominance, generative AI and Subsumption of academic labor

Ngwenyama, Ojelanki; Klein, Stefan; Rowe, Frantz

Abstract

Academic publishing is dominated by a small group of publishers whose platformization practices are threatening academic institutions and their values. These publishers deploy digital research and publishing platform infrastructures (DRPIs) to capture and transform scientific knowledge production in their private interest. This paper aims at analyzing this shift in the political economy of knowledge production and scholarly communication from expanding use of DRPIs. Using Marx’s theory of subsumption, we empirically analyze the case of Elsevier and its DRPI to theorize platform capture of scientific knowledge production. We find that DRPIs, recently reinforced by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), enable academic publishers to advance from real subsumption to general intellect subsumption, progressively sidelining academics in scientific knowledge production. Through regimes of marketization, appropriation and exploitation, the leading academic publishers impose structural dominance on academics to appropriate their labor, data and intellectual property rights. Despite the Open Science movement, DRPIs enable the private capture of societal wealth at the expense of epistemic communities and societal good. Without strong collective action, we will not be able to envision DRPIs that fit with academic values, nor will we be able to combat the negative outcomes of advancing platform capture on the institution of science.