総務大臣政務官就任記者会見の概要

総務副大臣就任記者会見の概要

第752回　入札監理小委員会（開催案内）

不適正利用対策に関するワーキンググループ（第11回）

AIセキュリティ分科会（第4回）開催案内

高市早苗首相は、24日の所信表明演説では触れなかったが、自民・維新の「連立政権合意書」では、「スパイ防止法」制定を明記している。この法律の危険性は、太平洋戦争開戦の1941年12月8日に起きた北大生・宮澤弘幸「スパイ冤罪事件」に示されている。市民団体「事件の真相を広める会」は、戦争体制化が進む現政権下でおなじ悲劇を繰り返してはならないと、同法の阻止をめざして『「12月8日」を記憶し続ける』を発刊した。（福島清）

　台湾有事を巡る中国の出方について米政権内の見方は二つに分かれている。トランプ大統領は、１０月２０日、記者団から中国軍が台湾に侵攻する可能性を問われ「中国はそんなことはしたくないだろう」と答えた。そのうえで「習国家主席にそうした様子はまったくみられない」「台湾は彼にとって非常に重要な存在だろうが、何かが起こるとは思わない」と述べた。一方、米情報機関は２０２７年までに中国軍が台湾に侵攻できる能力を保有すると分析。これを根拠に侵攻の可能性は高いという武力行使説は少数派だが、根強く..

　リベラル派の若き旗手として政界に躍り出た辻元清美氏も、もう還暦を越えた。今や重鎮政治家として日本の舵取りを担うべき地位にいる。彼女が対談相手に選んだのが日刊現代第一編集局長の小塚かおる氏。日頃から息が合う友人関係だから日本政治の奥深い闇を徹底的に語り合える。　辻元氏が珍しく弱音を吐いているのも、心を許した相手だからだろう。　彼女が国会を舞台にした「飲み食い政治」を拒 否し、新しい風を吹かせたことも有権者の記憶に残る。その記憶をもう一度確かめながら、新しい日本の在り方を探る。..

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. 

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 typically prioritizing paid content, downrank off-site links, and prioritize sensational claims to drive engagement. When users are free from enshittification and can themselves control the  platform’s algorithms, as they can on platforms like Bluesky, scientists get more engagement and find interactions 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 to attacks on science and the instability of digital monocultures.

This subtle influence of intermediaries can also appear in other tools relied on by researchers, while there are a number of open alternatives and interoperable tools developed for everything from citation management, data hosting to online chat among 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.

EFF is proud to celebrate Open Access Week.