Who owns scholarly publishing?
Part of the Open Divide 2025/2026 lecture series
Registration: for Uni.LU
Vincent Larivière, Lecturer and researcher in information science at the University of Montreal, Canada.
Corporate control of scholarly publishing has been a heated topic over the last two decades. This talk will revisit empirical evidence on corporate control of scholarly publishing, using both restrictive and inclusive data sources, and will compare open access and closed venues. It will also discuss issues surrounding the prestige of journals and platforms, with an emphasis on country and disciplinary variation. The talk will conclude with a discussion on the need for collective infrastructures for scholarly publishing and research evaluation.
This lecture examines the concept of transparency in science, exploring its benefits for innovation, reproducibility, and public trust while addressing its ambiguities, criticisms, and potential paths toward responsible implementation.