User tracking and profiling by major scientific publishers: what are the new challenges for libraries?

This document summarizes recent work, in particular reports by the SPARC association and the Committee for Scientific Library Services and Information Systems (AWBI) of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation). These reports document and alert us to the serious threats to the privacy of users of information resources. A growing proportion of publishers have moved towards licensing access to online content that remains hosted on their servers. Therefore, publishers have acquired considerable control over the collection, storage and analysis of library users’ reading and research data, including personal data.