Who’s Reading Who? Exploring the State of Third-Party Tracking Technology in Open Access Journal Content

The shift in scholarly communication from print to electronic format—and from ownership to access-based delivery models—has changed the dynamics of control related to library collections (Breeding 2019; Singley 2020). External providers now deliver most scholarly content to users, reducing library control to primarily print collections. User data gained through tracking technology, which often collects information without a user’s knowledge or agency, is a product of this shift that has been identified by previous studies (Hinchliffe, Zimmerman, and Altman 2018; Hanson 2019). This tracking data, aggregated by third parties who use it to form user profiles that can then be commodified, “challenges libraries’ historical assumptions about privacy and anonymity” (Hanson 2019, under “Aggregated Identities”).