This paper addresses the impact that the ever-growing involvement of scientists in knowledge-sharing practices by means of social media might have on the material conditions under which academic labour-power reproduces itself. Science communication is advocated for on the basis of its supposedly altruistic character, so scientists are prevented from expecting any form of remuneration ensuing from it. However, as our Marxian-informed analysis of the determinations of the value of the commodity labour-power will elucidate, this novel duty involves the exertion of (...) an additional quantity of work by academics, owing either to the relative complexation of the productive attributes requisite to use social media efficiently, or, particularly, to the accelerated pace at which scientists’ working capacity becomes productively consumed, both in absolute (extension of working hours) and in relative (work intensification) terms. It will be demonstrated that, as science communication via social media brings about an increase in the value of scientific labour power, wages must be raised so as to preserve science labourers in their normal condition. The article will further throw into relief that the political action of scientists themselves stands as the more general mediation for this innermost necessity of the capitalistic relationship of production to assert itself. (shrink)

This article grasps the coercive character often associated to research impact metrics, in the wake of the ever-growing use of quantitative indicators for the evaluation of the academic performance. It does so by taking a Marxian perspective which underscores what are the historically determined attributes of academic labour that the functioning of impact metrics embodies, unfolding thereby what ‘impact’ really means concerning said social attributes of the scientific enterprise. Science communication via social media, and the array of metrics and indicators (...) surrounding it, known as alternative metrics or altmetrics, are taken as a case study. This study concludes that the coercive nature of research impact metrics is grounded on the private and independent character taken by social labour in capitalist production, an historically determined form of the social reproduction that asks for academic production to be organised and regulated in an indirect fashion, behind the backs of producers themselves – in the particular case of science, by means of quantitative indicators and performance metrics. As research impact metrics bear the power to determine how and to what extent academic labourers contribute to the general productive process, their will and consciousness become thus subsumed to such reified social subject. (shrink)

There is a paucity of studies addressing the nature of the social relations of production prevailing in academia prior to the commodification of academic research. By filling that gap, this paper enables us to better understand the historical presuppositions from which the process of knowledge commodification in academia has evolved. Our theoretically informed analysis will focus on peer review, given that it is one of the few academic practices where traces of that historical past can still be found. On the (...) basis of Marx’s exposition of the main features of pre-capitalist social relations of production in the Grundrisse, it will be concluded that peer review reveals that social relations of production in academia were of a pre-capitalist, or natural-like, nature: peer review is labour of a direct nature; is the practice through which the academic community mediates its own reproduction, determining how – and, sometimes, if – its members enter into contact with the objective conditions of production; finally, in this latter capacity, peer review presupposes that the academic community relates to the conditions of knowledge production as though they were their collective property. These findings are employed to account for the underlying logics of the ongoing ‘functional transformation’ of peer review. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Science Communication inheres to the capitalist relations of production. By making use of Marxist dialectics, the enquiry will elucidate the enquiry will elucidate that capital creates the gap between science and society that Science Communication is deemed to bridge, for capitalism deprives workers of the ‘intellectual potencies of the material process of production’ and makes both impossible and meaningless for them to appropriate scientific knowledge in a direct, unmediated manner. Along these (...) lines, the paper will revisit the long-standing ‘deskilling-upskilling debate’ in order to shed light on what specific workers’ productive attributes form the material basis on which Science Communication grounded. I conclude that the existence of Science Communication responds to the fact that workers are devoid of any control over the social qualitative content of their work – the purpose and the mode of the labouring activity. In other words, Science Communication is premised on the limited form taken by the productive consciousness capital equips workers with in order just to reproduce itself. (shrink)