Research Integrity and The Future of Scholarly Communication: Internet Trackers and Algorithmic Persuasion

This paper presents new perspectives on the influence of new technologies in scholarly communication. Different from other papers on the future of scholarly communication, it combines 2 pillars of Open Science: Future of Scholarly Communication and Research Integrity (Open Science EU, 2020).

The authors performed a study in 2021, together with researchers from UCL, Cambridge University, Czech Technical University of Prague and a private company that specialises in introducing new technologies to libraries and research organisations. 

The study (148 organisations) unveiled a concerning picture, especially in regards to the presence of trackers and persuasive algorithms on scholarly communication and offered a glance in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in this field. At the date of our study, 60% of the web pages in our dataset (related to scholarly communication) offered no option to manage the internet cookies. Along the quantitative analysis, we conducted expert interviews, to understand the perception of those involved in the field towards such technologies

Our study identified a list of essential questions for our community, as well as a list of recommendations.

It is well known by now that in general, the digital content industry is heavily oriented toward building platforms that track users’ behaviour and seek to convince them to stay longer and come back sooner onto the platform. Its authors are incentivised to publish more and to become champions of dissemination or influencers. This content industry is permeable to non-human contributors (algorithms that are able to generate content and reactions), anonymity and identity fraud.

It is therefore pertinent to discuss if early signs of such track and persuasion technologies are currently present in scholarly communication, which over the years tended to be influenced by the digital content industry. The general aim is to determine a broader solution for building trust and infrastructure in scholarly communication. Early observations suggest that we can use the principles of open science to offer insights into this work going forward. The amount of data that needs to be collected and the need to involve different geographies suggest that for more robust research, citizen science could represent a viable solution.