Techno-colonization with Simeon Vidolov and Stefan Klein

About this episode

The episode discusses the concept of techno-colonization in scholarly communication and calls for reclaiming control from extractive publishing systems.

Professor Stefan Klein and Dr. Simeon Vidolov present their paper, "Techno-colonization of scholarly communication: A call to reclaim control".  This paper contributes to wider research into how extractive publishing systems have colonized scholarly communication to gain not only infrastructural control but increasingly epistemic control as well. For far too long, big publishing companies have trapped academics in a vicious circle of parasitic business models employing monopolistic pricing and arbitrary gate-keeping where researchers provide the labour, only for corporate giants to end up owning the published element of scientific intellectual property (often publicly funded) and consequently, control the visibility of research outputs. These companies have moved beyond publishing; they are now providers of critical, AI and data-analytics enabled research infrastructures. They are reshaping scientific knowledge production, academic values and increasingly claim epistemic authority. That such a system can be used to publish research so critical of its inherent structure is both ironic and potentially positive. The authors call for each of us to reject the role of passive…

People in this episode

Host: Camilla Noonan

Guests: Stefan Klein, Simeon Vidolov

Topics covered

• scholarly communication
• techno-colonization
• academic autonomy
• extractive publishing
• epistemic control
• research infrastructures

Keywords

• techno-colonization
• scholarly communication
• extractive publishing
• academic autonomy
• epistemic control
• research infrastructures
• corporate control

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: big publishing companies, scientific intellectual property, AI and data-analytics enabled research infrastructures

Books & works: Techno-colonization of scholarly communication: A call to reclaim control

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