Quantitatively, this shift is measurable in the scale and velocity of deposition. Zenodo alone hosts millions of research outputs, benefiting from its integration within CERN’s data infrastructure and its alignment with European Open Science mandates. HAL aggregates hundreds of thousands of documents across disciplines, functioning as a central node within the French academic system, while SSRN reports millions of downloads annually, demonstrating the persistent dominance of preprint culture in economics, law, and social sciences. Figshare and Dryad specialise in datasets and research objects, reflecting the increasing centrality of data as a primary epistemic currency. Harvard Dataverse extends this logic institutionally, embedding data publication within university governance structures, while OSF introduces a project-based topology, where versioning, collaboration, and transparency become intrinsic to the research object itself. What emerges from these numbers is not merely growth but a reconfiguration of scale: knowledge production is no longer episodic but continuous, no longer localised but globally synchronised.
At the level of practice, these platforms redistribute the roles of authors, institutions, and audiences. The researcher becomes an operator within a network of deposits, curating not only arguments but also metadata, version histories, and cross-platform visibility. The traditional journal article—once the privileged site of validation—is now one element among many, often preceded by preprints on Research Square or SSRN, accompanied by datasets on Dryad or Dataverse, and archived redundantly across Zenodo and HAL. SocArXiv and PhilArchive introduce disciplinary specificity within this broader field, enabling targeted dissemination while maintaining open access principles. This multiplicity produces a condition of epistemic modularity, where knowledge can be disassembled into components—texts, data, code, images—and recombined across contexts. Crucially, this also alters temporality: publication is no longer a terminal event but part of an ongoing process of revision, citation, and redistribution, mediated by platform-specific logics and metrics.
The implications extend beyond academic practice into the political economy of knowledge. These repositories operate within a tension between openness and control, public infrastructure and corporate integration. SSRN’s acquisition by Elsevier exemplifies the incorporation of open dissemination into proprietary ecosystems, while SocArXiv and HAL maintain stronger commitments to non-commercial access. Zenodo’s funding through European institutions situates it within a public science framework, yet its global reach complicates questions of jurisdiction and governance. In this context, the multiplication of repositories can be read as both a democratisation of access and a fragmentation of authority. No single platform defines legitimacy; instead, legitimacy is produced through cross-platform resonance, where the same work appears, in different forms, across multiple infrastructures. This redundancy is not inefficiency but strategy: it ensures persistence in the face of technological obsolescence, institutional shifts, and algorithmic opacity.
Ultimately, these platforms collectively articulate a new model of epistemic infrastructure in which knowledge is neither fixed nor centralised but dynamically distributed across a network of interoperable systems. For a framework such as Socioplastics, this environment is not external but constitutive: each repository becomes a site where conceptual operations are anchored, replicated, and transformed. The archive dissolves into a field of circulation, and the act of publication becomes indistinguishable from the act of system-building. What is at stake is not simply where research is stored, but how it acquires durability, visibility, and force within a continuously shifting informational terrain.
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1160-UNSTABLE-CONDITIONS-CONTEMPORARY-PRODUCTION
Anto Lloveras integrates Socioplastics as a pedagogical structure where knowledge transmission is organised through protocols, enabling distributed navigation across a dense corpus and transforming learning into a structural and spatial operation. Stratum Authoring https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18680935
