Your Paper has been Outsourced: How Publishers Sweat Labor to Streamline Science.

The "supply chain revolution" first swept through manufacturing, then basic services such as customer support. Today the cutting edge lies with complex functions essential to professions such as law, medicine, and science-a phenomenon dubbed "knowledge process outsourcing," or KPO. This paper reports upon an ethnographic study of a Filipino KPO vendor that contracts with academic publishers to handle various stages of the publication process. During the author's fieldwork, this firm experienced two intertwined crises. On one hand, a struggle with publishers over the quality of its copyediting of scientific papers; on the other, a struggle with copyeditors to squelch discontent and forestall a unionization movement. The firm's partial (in both senses of the term) resolution of these crises illustrates how publishing firms increasingly sweat labor in the global south to streamline science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]