Markets and Metadata: Exploring the sociology of academic publishing in the digital era

Generating revenues of more than £19bn globally, the academic publishing industry is a diverse ecology of commercial firms, university presses and learned societies producing scholarly research articles and books. It has a symbiotic relationship with the academy: publishers depend on the labour of scholars who produce research outputs and pedagogical texts, while academic careers rely upon the efficient dissemination of that scholarship. The relationship is increasingly fraught, with critics questioning high profit margins that are achieved through the 'paywalling' of publicly-funded research and those same critics calling for open access alternatives to the profit-driven publishing model.
This turn towards open access is made possible by-is a possible consequence of-a process of digitalisation that has reduced (if not entirely eliminated) the material constraints associated with traditional printed outputs, and where electronic formats are considered by publishers to be equivalent in economic value, or even superior to, their 'legacy' printed counterparts. This transition from 'print-first' to 'digital-first' began in the scholarly journals field and it is here that we see its impact most clearly, with a digital infrastructure created to support authors, editors and readers. Although it has lagged behind, the academic book publishing field is undergoing its own process of digitalisation, driven in part by changing reading habits and the widespread adoption of electronic reading technologies, but also by an ongoing 'monograph crisis' of declining print sales which has led many publishers in recent years to produce ever greater numbers of books in an attempt to benefit from the economies of scale that are associated with volume. Shaw, Phillips and Gutiérrez (2021) report that this trend has increased dramatically since 2015, coinciding with increased electronic usage of books and the emergence of proprietary digital platforms (e.g., Oxford Scholarship Online, Cambridge Core, Springer Link) that deliver large packages of bundled content direct to institutional readers in an attempt to bypass entrenched market intermediaries like booksellers and wholesalers who erode publishers' profits.
As the industry changes, the practice of book publishing continues to be associated with the figure of editor, a key organisational actor who acquires manuscripts for their press through gate-keeping and entrepreneurial activities. As the public face of their organisation, the editor is accorded a higher social status than 'back room' staff such as marketing and production/manufacturing who are viewed as less powerful service providers. However, while the core editorial function of the field appears to remain relatively unchanged by the digital turn, new considerations relating to the production and management of an ever-expanding universe of descriptive metadata-abstracts and keywords, subject classifications, bibliographic properties-have become profound matters for publishers and other market participants who are dealing with ever-larger volumes of publications that, by virtue of digitalisation, are increasingly conceived in ways that are decoupled from their highly visible, physical forms. Where metadata were only recently thought of as technologies that publishers did not fully appreciate, they have become imbued with urgency and importance.
This research will explore how and why metadata matters to the market: how they are unsettling and transforming long-established editorial practices, organisational hierarchies, assumptions about what is valued, and how the seemingly mundane 'metadata work' carried out by supposedly low-status publishing actors can be considered an important site of knowledge production. It aims to explore how metadata are changing how books are produced, consumed and even imagined, and to consider the consequences for researchers, publishers, policy-makers and funders.