How Do We Find Ourselves Here? Context for Increased Institutional Investment and Ownership of Infrastructure · The Knowledge Futures Commonplace

The Knowledge Futures Group (KFG) builds technology for the production, curation, and preservation of knowledge in service of the public good. It was founded, in the words of MIT Press Director Amy Brand, in the hopes of galvanizing “a real movement towards greater institutional and public investment in that infrastructure.”1 But why is there a need for institutions to invest in infrastructure? This post hopes to provide context by highlighting some key trends and offering a selection of articles for further reading.

Publishing generally has long been an industry with a wide variety of offerings. However, the latter half of the twentieth century (and early twenty-first) has been characterized by increasing consolidation of content by four large publishers (Elsevier, Wiley, SpringerNature, and Taylor and Francis), who now controlling the vast majority of journal publications in Science, Technology, and Medicine. More recently, a similar consolidation has taken place among the technology vendors that online content providers depend upon to host their content. Atypon, for example, now owned by Wiley, hosts a bit less than 50% of English language journal content.

This consolidation trend increasingly affects smaller society and independent publishers who find that their submission systems (peer review) and dissemination platforms may, in fact, be owned by their competitors. Not to be content with the consolidation of content, commercial publishers and other vendors are regularly acquiring workflow tools in what appears to be an attempt to “own” the entire researcher workflow. Universities may even find that the data about their own research outputs and researcher activities is now “owned” by private companies.

Another trend, on the university side, is generally decreasing support for affiliated university presses, in some cases the proposal of draconian cuts akin to UP death warrants. While university departments, and even individual researchers, develop promising research tools to solve key challenges, such efforts often have no choice but to either turn themselves into companies to obtain vital grant money or attract venture capital investors to survive. Once gaining a foothold amongst researchers and achieving some degree of name recognition, these start ups are often gobbled up by the commercial publishers and vendors, completing the vicious cycle.

How have institutions become so disconnected from the workflow and publication tools that their researchers depend upon to do research, communicate it, validate it? How can this tremendous outsourcing be corrected? How can universities better understand the need for investing in public infrastructure?

We hope that this reading list will provide background and food for thought.

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