24. Academic Pollution. The platformization of the university between Publish and Perish
Paolo Parra Saiani, University of Genoa;
The pressure for publication is increasing exponentially, opening a space for publishers seeking easy money and authors that want (just as easily) to increase their productivity. We all are receiving an avalanche of invitations to publish (upon payment) from journals that were almost unknown by the scientific community (Cordeiro and Lima 2017), but that in recent years are getting a lot of popularity. Deviant behavior or unawareness? Formally, no rule gets broken: scientists may publish their results respecting all the principles that methodology teaches us, sometimes the same scientist has a loose knowledge of the Journal in which he will publish, but sometimes publishing in such a Journal is the result of a conscious choice. This leads us to the 'academic pollution', an emerging form of pollution due to academic piracy, the emergence of 'predatory publishers' and 'predatory conferences' associated with the potential decline in the academic quality of research.
In times of 'academic capitalism', what are the trends in science? Social scientists, STS scholars, policy scholars as well as practitioners in the academic publishing industry are welcome to submit theoretically, empirically and/or methodologically oriented contributions that aim to explore the following:
- Emerging forms of 'academic piracy'.
- Academic predatory practices.
- The platformization of academic publishing and the use of metric, and scientometric indicators.
Keywords: Disciplines and the Social Organization of Science and Technology, Scientometrics, Infrastructure, Academic predatory practices; Publish or Perish
