Thu, 6 Nov 2025 11:02:33 +1100
Andrew Pam <xanni [at] glasswings.com.au>
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/11/04/science-must-decentralize/
"Knowledge production doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every great scientific
breakthrough is built on prior work, and an ongoing exchange with peers in the
field. That’s why we need to address the threat of major publishers and
platforms having an improper influence on how scientific knowledge is
accessed—or outright suppressed.
In the digital age, the collaborative and often community-governed effort of
scholarly research has gone global and unlocked unprecedented potential to
improve our understanding and quality of life. That is, if we let it.
Publishers continue to monopolize access to life-saving research and increase
the burden on researchers through article processing charges and a pyramid of
volunteer labor. This exploitation makes a mockery of open inquiry and the
denial of access as a serious human rights issue.
While alternatives like Diamond Open Access are promising, crashing through
publishing gatekeepers isn’t enough. Large intermediary platforms are capturing
other aspects of the research process—inserting themselves between researchers
and between the researchers and these published works—through platformization.
Funneling scholars into a few major platforms isn’t just annoying, it’s
corrosive to privacy and intellectual freedom. Enshittification has come for
research infrastructure, turning everyday tools into avenues for surveillance.
Most professors are now worried their research is being scrutinized by academic
bossware, forcing them to worry about arbitrary metrics which don’t always
reflect research quality. While playing this numbers game, a growing threat of
surveillance in scholarly publishing gives these measures a menacing tilt,
chilling the publication and access of targeted research areas. These risks
spike in the midst of governmental campaigns to muzzle scientific knowledge,
buttressed by a scourge of platform censorship on corporate social media.
The only antidote to this ‘platformization’ is Open Science and
decentralization. Infrastructure we rely on must be built in the open and on
interoperable standards, and hostile to corporate (or governmental) takeovers.
Universities and the science community are well situated to lead this fight. As
we’ve seen in EFF’s TOR University Challenge, promoting access to knowledge and
public interest infrastructure is aligned with the core values of higher
education."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
"Knowledge production doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every great scientific
breakthrough is built on prior work, and an ongoing exchange with peers in the
field. That’s why we need to address the threat of major publishers and
platforms having an improper influence on how scientific knowledge is
accessed—or outright suppressed.
In the digital age, the collaborative and often community-governed effort of
scholarly research has gone global and unlocked unprecedented potential to
improve our understanding and quality of life. That is, if we let it.
Publishers continue to monopolize access to life-saving research and increase
the burden on researchers through article processing charges and a pyramid of
volunteer labor. This exploitation makes a mockery of open inquiry and the
denial of access as a serious human rights issue.
While alternatives like Diamond Open Access are promising, crashing through
publishing gatekeepers isn’t enough. Large intermediary platforms are capturing
other aspects of the research process—inserting themselves between researchers
and between the researchers and these published works—through platformization.
Funneling scholars into a few major platforms isn’t just annoying, it’s
corrosive to privacy and intellectual freedom. Enshittification has come for
research infrastructure, turning everyday tools into avenues for surveillance.
Most professors are now worried their research is being scrutinized by academic
bossware, forcing them to worry about arbitrary metrics which don’t always
reflect research quality. While playing this numbers game, a growing threat of
surveillance in scholarly publishing gives these measures a menacing tilt,
chilling the publication and access of targeted research areas. These risks
spike in the midst of governmental campaigns to muzzle scientific knowledge,
buttressed by a scourge of platform censorship on corporate social media.
The only antidote to this ‘platformization’ is Open Science and
decentralization. Infrastructure we rely on must be built in the open and on
interoperable standards, and hostile to corporate (or governmental) takeovers.
Universities and the science community are well situated to lead this fight. As
we’ve seen in EFF’s TOR University Challenge, promoting access to knowledge and
public interest infrastructure is aligned with the core values of higher
education."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
