Science Must Decentralize

"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 ."

"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."

Scientific knowledge builds on prior work and peer exchange, requiring open access and collaborative infrastructures. Major publishers and platforms monopolize access to research, impose article processing charges, and rely on pyramids of unpaid volunteer labor that exploit researchers and deny access to life-saving information. Diamond Open Access presents a promising alternative, but platformization inserts large intermediaries into the research process, separating researchers from each other and from published works. Platform consolidation erodes privacy and intellectual freedom through surveillance, academic 'bossware', and arbitrary metrics that fail to reflect research quality. Governmental censorship and corporate platform moderation intensify these threats. Open Science and decentralized infrastructures are presented as necessary remedies.

Read at Electronic Frontier Foundation