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 througharticle processing chargesand apyramid of volunteer labor.This exploitationmakes a mockery of open inquiry and the denial of access as a serioushuman rights issue.

While alternatives likeDiamond Open Accessare 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-throughplatformization.

Funneling scholars into a few major platforms isn't just annoying, it's corrosive to privacy and intellectual freedom.Enshittificationhas come for research infrastructure, turning everyday tools into avenues for surveillance. Mostprofessors are now worriedtheir research is being scrutinized by academic bossware, forcing them toworry about arbitrary metricswhich don't always reflect research quality. While playing this numbers game, a growing threat ofsurveillance in scholarly publishinggives these measures a menacing tilt, chilling the publication and access of targeted research areas. These risks spike in the midst of governmentalcampaigns to muzzle scientific knowledge, buttressed by a scourge ofplatform censorshipon corporate social media.

The only antidote to this platformization' isOpen Scienceand 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'sTOR University Challenge, promoting access to knowledge and public interest infrastructure is aligned with the core values of higher education.

Using social media as an example, universities have a strong interest in promoting the work being done at their campuses far and wide. This is where traditional platforms fall short: algorithms typicallyprioritizing paid content,downrank off-site links, andprioritize sensational claimsto drive engagement. When users are free from enshittification and can themselves control the platform's algorithms, as they can on platforms like Bluesky, scientists getmore engagementand findinteractions are more useful.

Institutions play a pivotal role in encouraging the adoption of these alternatives, ranging from leveraging existing IT support to assist with account use and verification, all the way to shouldering some of the hosting with Mastodon instances and/or Bluesky PDS for official accounts. This support is good for the research, good for the university, and makes our systems of science more resilient toattacks on scienceandthe instabilityofdigital monocultures.

This subtle influence of intermediaries can also appear in other tools relied on by researchers, while there area number of open alternativesand interoperable tools developed for everything fromcitation management,data hostingtoonline chatamong collaborators. Individual scholars and research teams can implement these tools today, but real change depends on institutions investing in tech that puts community before shareholders.

When infrastructure is too centralized, gatekeepers gain new powers to capture, enshittify, and censor. The result is a system that becomes less useful, less stable, and with more costs put on access. Science thrives on sharing and access equity, and its future depends on a global and democratic revolt against predatory centralized platforms.

Republished from the EFF's Deeplinks blog.