Elsevier’s Judy Verses, in a February interview with The Scholarly Kitchen:
At Elsevier we try to support researchers, librarians, academic leaders, funders and governments by combining quality information and data sets with analytical tools to facilitate insights and critical decision-making. Science is increasingly more multidisciplinary, reproducible and transparent. The volume of research continues to grow, and researchers are increasingly sharing their datasets. These trends mean we have a clear opportunity to help the research community with our journals, our platforms, analytics capabilities, the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to surface what is relevant, make connections and make smart decisions.
The whole interview is press-release pablum, but this paragraph is fascinating. Verses, Elsevier’s president of “Academic and Government Markets,” is trading in a revealing self-contradiction: She’s referring, on the one hand, to Elsevier’s propriety analytics tools, but also—with conflationary jujitsu—dataset-sharing in (open) science. The RELX Group’s data-hoovering is, to the state the obvious, anything but “transparent,” and by “sharing” they mean selling our surveilled behavior back to us—as high-priced prediction products.