of the make-knowledge-access-great-again dept
Knowledge production does not take place in a vacuum. Every major scientific breakthrough is based on previous work and an ongoing exchange with colleagues in the field. That’s why we need to address the threat of major publishers and platforms having undue influence over the way scientific knowledge is made accessible – or outright suppressed.
In the digital age, the collaborative and often community-driven effort of scientific research has gone global and unlocked unprecedented potential to improve our understanding and quality of life. That is, if we allow it. Publishers continue to monopolize access to life-saving research, increasing the burden on researchers processing fees for items and a pyramid of volunteer work. This exploitation makes a mockery of open inquiry and denying access as a serious matter human rights issue.
While alternatives such as Diamond Open Access are promising, it is not enough to break through the gatekeepers of publications. Large intermediary platforms capture other aspects of the research process – they place themselves between researchers and between the researchers and these published works – through platformization.
Sending scientists to a few major platforms is not only annoying, it is also harmful to privacy and intellectual freedom. Enshittification has emerged for research infrastructure, transforming everyday tools into surveillance capabilities. Most Professors are now concerned their research is scrutinized by academic bosses, forcing them to do so worrying about arbitrary statistics which do not always reflect the quality of the research. While playing this numbers game, a growing threat arises supervision in scientific publications gives these measures a menacing edge, chilling publication and access to targeted areas of research. These risks increase in the middle of government campaigns to muzzle scientific knowledgesustained by a plague of platform censorship on company social media.
The only antidote to this ‘platformization’ is Open science and decentralization. The infrastructure we rely on must be built openly and on interoperable standards, and must be hostile to corporate (or government) takeovers. Universities and the scientific community are well positioned to lead this fight. As we have seen in EFFs TOR University ChallengePromoting access to knowledge and infrastructure of public interest is in line with the core values of higher education.
Using social media as an example, universities have a vested interest in promoting far and wide the work being done on their campuses. This is where traditional platforms fall short: usually algorithms prioritizing paid content, reduce off-site linksAnd Prioritize sensational claims encourage involvement. When users are free from enshittification and can control the platform’s algorithms themselves, as on platforms like Bluesky, scientists get more involvement and find interactions are more useful.
Institutions play a critical role in encouraging adoption of these alternatives, ranging from leveraging existing IT support to assist with account usage and verification, to taking on some of the hosting with Mastodon instances and/or Bluesky PDS for official accounts. This support is good for research, good for the university and makes our science systems more resilient to this attacks on science And the instability by digital monocultures.
This subtle influence of intermediaries may also be reflected in other tools that researchers rely on, even though they exist a number of open alternatives and interoperable tools developed for everything from citation management, data hosting Unpleasant online chatting among collaborators. Individual scientists and research teams can implement these tools today, but real change depends on institutions investing in technology that puts community before shareholders.
When the infrastructure is too centralized, gatekeepers are given new powers to capture, target, and censor. The result is a system that becomes less usable, less stable, and costs more to access. Science thrives on sharing and gaining equality, and its future depends on a global and democratic uprising against predatory centralized platforms.
Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.
Filed Under: decentralization, diamond open access, knowledge, open access, open science, paywalls, research, science
#Science #decentralized