Today the market value of Alphabet, GoogleвЂ™s parent company, hovers around $2 trillion. Harnessing its search-and-services-derived user data, Google went on to capture almost 30% of worldwide digital ad revenue ( Cramer-Flood 2021).

By 2004, the company had gone public, valued at $27 billion ( La Monica 2004). 3) has documented, the company went all in with ads: targeted ads, informed by the user data trove the company had laying about.

In the face of the 2001 dot-com meltdown and investor demands, Brin and Page-to borrow the Silicon Valley verb-pivoted. вЂњWe expect,вЂќ Brin and Page wrote, вЂњadvertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumersвЂќ-a вЂњparticularly insidious bias,вЂќ they added, since itвЂ™s so hard to detect ( 2012, 3832). In a now notorious appendix to their published talk, the two graduate students decried the ad-driven business model of their commercial rivals. With Google, they said, вЂњwe have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realmвЂќ (109). They complained that companies like Yahoo! wouldnвЂ™t make their methods public, with the result that search technology remains вЂњlargely a black artвЂќ (109). Two decades later in Brisbane, Brin and Page (1998) positioned Google as the academic antidote to ad-driven search engines. de Solla Price (1965, 510) put it in a seminal paper, citations furnish a вЂњtotal world network of scientific papers.вЂќ By the early 1970s, on the strength of computing advances, full-fledged citation analysis was being used to measure journal impacts, scientific productivity, and the structure of academic influence. The Google founders had taken the core insight of bibliometrics, a field that emerged in the 1960s to study (among other things) the web of academic citations.

Their approach, they continued, is an extension of the вЂњcademic citation literatureвЂќ (109). A given web pageвЂ™s вЂњPageRank,вЂќ they explained, is a measure of its вЂњcitation importance,вЂќ which turns out to match, with uncanny consistency, what searchers want to find. вЂњThe citation (link) graph of the Web,вЂќ they said, вЂњis an important resource that has largely gone unused in existing search enginesвЂќ ( Brin and 8, 109). As the pair acknowledged in Brisbane, their key idea-to use the webвЂ™s link structure as a plebiscite for search relevance-was borrowed from citation analysis. Less famous is the debt that Brin and Page owed to library science and the field of bibliometrics. GoogleвЂ™s dorm-to-garage origin story is well known. Speaking at the Seventh International World Wide Web conference (Within two years, Brin and Page had dispatched their search engine rivals and were on the way to building the largest advertising business in the history of capitalism. In April 1998, two Stanford graduate students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, flew across the world to deliver a paper on their nascent search engine, Google. The Journal of Electronic Publishing 25(1). Keywords: elseiver, scholarly publishing, data, prediction products, analytics A final concernВ is that scholars will internalize an analytics mindset, one already encouraged by citation counts and impact factors. The productsвЂ™ purpose, moreover, is to streamline the top-down assessment and evaluation practices that have taken hold in recent decades. It is likely,В I argue, that windfall subscription-and-APC profits in ElsevierвЂ™s вЂњlegacyвЂќ publishing business have financed its decade-long acquisition binge in analytics. The essay concludes by considering some of the potential costs of surveillance publishing, as other big commercial publishers increasingly enter the predictive-analytics business. The recent history of Elsevier is traced to describe the companyвЂ™s research-lifecycle data-harvesting strategy, with the aim to develop and sell prediction products to unviersity and other customers.

The essay develops the idea of surveillance publishing by engaging with the work of Shoshana Zuboff, Jathan Sadowski,В Mariano-Florentino CuГ©llar, and Aziz Huq. The essay begins by tracing the Google search engineвЂ™s roots in bibliometrics, alongside a history of the citation analysis company that became, in 2016, Clarivate. A scholarly publisher can be defined as a surveillance publisher if it derives a substantial proportion of its revenue from prediction products, fueled by data extracted from researcher behavior. This essay develops the idea of surveillance publishing, with special attention to the example of Elsevier.

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