Happy Friday! This week’s Big Deal Longread is actually a Long watch - a video of a virtual presentation by the neurobiologist Bjorn Brembs, a frequent agitator for radical reform to the scholarly publishing ecosystem. In this lecture, Brembs addresses two major issues in the world of academic publishing: the oligopoly publishers’ deleterious effects on science itself, and their “pivot to data analytics” (or, as Jefferson Pooley helpfully characterizes it in one of last week’s longreads, surveillance publishing) as a core business. Putting these two phenomena together, Brembs concludes that if the big publishers are truly pivoting away from publishing as their core business, that can only be good for science. The sooner these companies exit publishing, the better, Brembs argues. Watch the full presentation here: