【シグマベンディングサービスとの闘い】熱中症死亡労災の遺族が怒りの社前行動
お知らせ:JPCERT/CC Eyes「攻撃グループAPT-C-60による攻撃のアップデート」
報告「日の丸・君が代」強制反対! 学校に自由と人権を!10・26集会
アリの一言:高市所信表明で最も注目した個所
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
[B] 高市内閣が狙う「スパイ防止法」策動を阻止する運動は急務だ 「12月8日」を忘れるな
【焦点】中国台湾統一国是だが、習主席は武力侵攻を回避 ウクライナ侵略のロシアの死傷者数増加にためらう=橋詰雅博
報告 : 10.24「柏崎刈羽原発動かすな」官邸前行動
経産省前脱原発テント日誌(10/23)柏崎刈羽再稼働反対、普天間直ちに閉鎖、戦争国家化反対
【おすすめ本】辻元清美+小塚かおる『日本政治の大問題 陰謀論、裏金・献金 暴走SNSの本質を問う』―有権者からの貴重な意見や分析 糧に日本のあり方を探る=鈴木 耕(編集者)
声明 : 高市極右政権成立による憲法9条破壊と戦争国家体制づくりに立ち向かおう
〔週刊 本の発見〕『教員の「働き方改革」はなぜ進まないのか』
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.
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.