The contemporary transformation of scholarly communication is not simply technological. It is epistemological, geopolitical, and infrastructural. Research visibility is no longer determined exclusively by journals indexed in proprietary systems such as Scopus or Web of Science, but increasingly by the capacity of a corpus to circulate through interoperable networks of metadata, repositories, identifiers, APIs, citation graphs, and open infrastructures. In this emerging condition, visibility becomes less dependent on institutional gatekeeping and more dependent on machinic legibility, persistence, and distributed accessibility.
Christine Borgman’s work on networked scholarship provides one of the clearest foundations for understanding this shift. In Big Data, Little Data, No Data, she argues that data are never neutral objects but socially situated constructions whose value depends on infrastructures of storage, interpretation, reuse, and mediation. Scholarship increasingly operates through interconnected systems where archives, repositories, identifiers, and metadata become as important as the publication itself. Knowledge production is therefore inseparable from knowledge infrastructure. Borgman’s framework helps explain why repositories such as Zenodo, HAL, figshare, OpenAIRE, or OpenAlex are no longer secondary supports to scholarship but active epistemic environments. Bianca Kramer and Jeroen Bosman expand this infrastructural perspective through their mapping of “101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication.” Their research reframes scholarship as a cyclical workflow composed of preparation, discovery, analysis, writing, publication, outreach, and assessment. Each phase is mediated by digital tools, repositories, metrics, collaborative platforms, and social dissemination systems. Research visibility thus emerges from an ecosystem rather than from a single publication venue. Their work demonstrates that scholarly communication has become operationally distributed: blogs, repositories, datasets, social media, APIs, reference managers, citation graphs, and open infrastructures all participate in the production of academic presence.
Within this transformation, OpenCitations represents a decisive political and technical intervention. Peroni and Shotton describe citation data as a fundamental scholarly infrastructure historically enclosed within proprietary systems such as Web of Science and Scopus. OpenCitations proposes a fully open alternative based on Linked Open Data and Semantic Web technologies, allowing citations themselves to become reusable public infrastructure. Citations cease to be private assets owned by commercial indexing corporations and become navigable relational architectures available to researchers globally. This shift alters the political economy of visibility itself. Scholarly authority is no longer entirely monopolised by commercial databases but can emerge through open citation ecologies, interoperable metadata, and distributed infrastructures. Jean-Claude Guédon situates this transformation within the broader geopolitics of scientific power. His critique of the division between “mainstream” and “peripheral” science reveals how academic visibility has historically been organised through oligarchic structures centred in dominant linguistic and institutional systems. Open access, in his view, is not merely a technical matter of free availability but a structural reconfiguration of scientific authority. Repositories, institutional archives, multilingual infrastructures, and open dissemination systems become mechanisms capable of redistributing epistemic legitimacy beyond the traditional centres of power. Guédon’s argument resonates strongly with Bourdieu’s notion of the scientific field, but it also extends it toward infrastructural politics in the digital era.
Leslie Chan and collaborators further radicalise this position by arguing that open science must move beyond open access toward cognitive justice and epistemic plurality. In Open Science Beyond Open Access, openness is understood not simply as access to publications and datasets but as openness to communities, excluded knowledges, Indigenous epistemologies, and Global South perspectives. Open infrastructures therefore acquire ethical and political significance: they can either reproduce asymmetries or support more plural forms of knowledge circulation. Visibility becomes inseparable from inclusion. At the institutional scale, OPERAS offers perhaps the clearest European model for this transition. Its infrastructure federates multilingual discovery systems, metrics services, repositories, monographs, and scholarly communication tools for the social sciences and humanities. OPERAS demonstrates that open science in SSH requires more than repositories alone: it requires coordinated ecosystems capable of integrating metadata, peer review transparency, multilingual searchability, analytics, and public discoverability across national boundaries.
The Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information crystallises these dispersed tendencies into a collective political commitment. It explicitly argues that research information should be open by default and warns against the dependency of academia on closed infrastructures controlled by private corporations. The declaration frames openness not as idealism but as a necessary condition for transparency, reproducibility, equity, and institutional autonomy. Taken together, these thinkers and infrastructures describe a profound historical transition. Scholarship is evolving from a journal-centred model toward a distributed infrastructural ecology composed of repositories, identifiers, metadata systems, citation graphs, datasets, APIs, and machine-readable archives. Visibility increasingly depends on whether a corpus can circulate, interconnect, persist, and remain computationally legible across multiple layers of the open web. In this emerging environment, the archive is no longer passive storage. It becomes an active epistemic machine.
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