Reducing Silos for Infrastructure and Survival
“Decentralized Infrastructure for (Neuro)Science” reckons with the lack of infrastructure in science to openly share knowledge. It acknowledges the human and financial resources drained due to lack of infrastructure. It lays out what decentralized shared infrastructure that we build, own, and control could look like. I point readers toward this guide for a strong theoretical underpinning for why open knowledge is important, and how monied “open” providers cannot meet our knowledge infrastructure needs.
The silos I see in my discipline of library science look the same when I read about silos in neuroscience. Academic institutions enjoy different resourcing levels overall, and different resourcing levels for “open access,” greatly affecting support for open knowledge infrastructure.
Silos may look like they use less resources in the short-term. It takes more labor and time to operate under broad consensus and collaboration. Working alone or with fully known quantities often facilitates quicker results. But in the long-term, silos are inefficient because they do not produce the best solutions. Producing ethical research across institutions and borders is challenging. We live in a world where the short-term is privileged over the long-term, and taking the time to collaborate and thoughtfully consider and respond to different ideas is a radical act, a deep commitment to our craft.
Saunders identifies realities in the neuroscience community that ring true across academia, including in librarianship. “Open” is still a bit performative, without the resourcing and strategic muscle to preserve and provide access to work in new media forms. Platforms enclose our work and restrain our creativity. Publishers often ignore or minimize the need to preserve and provide access to underlying research data. For very large publishers, their main business is in user data capture and sale, not necessarily knowledge production.
We must generate accessible and open knowledge in order to cross-pollinate our work across disciplines, for survival. Sharing practices and understanding across disciplines is necessary for us to achieve our research and community goals in today’s complex and interconnected world. Research as an enterprise does not fit within dominant capitalist frameworks and thus researchers will always fight for the survival of their craft. To thrive, academics must engage in solidarity-building activities with their colleagues and across institutional and state borders, maintaining strong research networks that will survive across generations. Community self-publishing is a space where these activities can flourish.
The explosion in access to information and communication technologies over the past few decades has increased our ability to communicate, understand each other, and work together. Good practices are being designed and redesigned in rapid succession as we work to keep up with new technologies, the pressures of market forces, and our academic disciplines’ stated values and ethics. The increased ability to communicate and understand each other also inspires many academic workers to re-design or amend good practices in ways that make our work less harmful, oppressive, or colonial.
While we think of academics as usually going through a tenure process, often beholden to traditional publishing practices, reality is different: most academics are not tenured or working toward tenure. According to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the US academic workforce has shifted from full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty to mostly contingent faculty in the past few decades. About 24% of US faculty members enjoy full-time tenured appointments in 2021 compared to 39% in 1987.[1] Since the AAUP began tracking this data, tenured appointments were never the majority, but the percentage of tenured professors is continually decreasing. There are many reasons that finicky, traditional, prestige-oriented, anonymous-reviewed publications are valuable to different scholars, but a majority of the US academic workforce can choose not to engage with the publishing system if they wish.
