In 2014, the Colombian biology student Diego Gómez faced criminal prosecution after sharing another researcher’s thesis online so that a colleague without institutional access could consult it. The document concerned amphibian taxonomy. The disproportion between the act and the possible punishment exposed a basic contradiction in contemporary knowledge policy: while universities and funding agencies celebrated “open science” as a progressive institutional horizon, the circulation of a scholarly PDF could still be treated as a criminal offence. The contradiction was not between openness and secrecy alone. It was between two incompatible meanings of sustainability: one concerned with the efficient management of technical systems, the other with the political conditions under which knowledge may be produced, circulated and reused. This distinction matters because “sustainable science” is frequently reduced to a narrow environmental accounting of research infrastructure: energy-efficient servers, lower-emission computing, reduced paper use and greener data centres. These measures are necessary, but they are not sufficient. They reveal almost nothing about who owns repositories, who pays to publish, whose journals are indexed, whose knowledge becomes career-relevant and who assumes the unpaid labour of maintaining public scholarly systems. Sustainability measured only through energy consumption can leave intact the economic and epistemic structures that determine who is permitted to become visible.
Jean-Claude Guédon has shown how the original political promise of open access was gradually absorbed into a commercial publishing system that altered the direction of payment without fundamentally changing ownership. Under the Article Processing Charge model, readers may access an article without payment, but authors or their institutions must often pay substantial fees to make that article available. The publisher continues to control the platform, the journal brand, the metrics and the prestige through which publication becomes professionally consequential. The enclosure has not disappeared. It has been displaced from the reader to the producer.
This is SemanticHardening in a precise institutional form. A word that emerged as an argument against enclosure becomes embedded in contracts, invoices, licensing systems, funder mandates and compliance dashboards. “Open” ceases to operate as a political claim requiring evidence and begins to function as an administrative category. Once this hardening occurs, the problem can no longer be solved by repeating the ethical case for circulation. The word has already been accepted. What must be transformed is the architecture that determines the price, ownership and recognition of that circulation.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos provides the deeper epistemological diagnosis. His concept of abyssal thinking describes the line through which dominant systems of knowledge render other epistemologies invisible rather than simply contesting them. Below that line, knowledge is not necessarily declared false. It is excluded from the institutional conditions through which truth becomes legible: citation databases, recognised journals, funding criteria, doctoral training and systems of professional evaluation.
An open-access mandate does not automatically move this line. A researcher may deposit every article in a repository and remain structurally marginal if the journals in which she publishes are absent from the citation systems used to evaluate appointments, grants and promotion. Openness at the level of access may coexist with closure at the level of recognition. A document may be freely available and professionally invisible.
SystemicLock names the mechanism by which this contradiction persists without requiring a central conspiracy. The lock is distributed across mutually reinforcing decisions: appointment committees privilege journals with recognised impact factors; impact factors are produced within bounded commercial indexes; those indexes underrepresent many scholarly ecologies; funders use the same indicators to define excellence; researchers respond rationally by directing their work towards the venues those systems reward. Each decision can appear locally reasonable while the combined structure reproduces the same hierarchy.
The importance of SciELO, Redalyc and AmeliCA lies in their demonstration that another publishing form already exists. These Latin American infrastructures were developed through universities, libraries and public institutions and are strongly associated with diamond open access: publication free for readers and authors, with costs carried collectively rather than charged through individual articles. They should not be understood as regional imitations of a Northern model. In significant respects, they embody an older and more ambitious conception of scholarly circulation as a public good.
The contradiction appears when researchers working within these systems are encouraged to abandon them in order to publish in supposedly more international venues whose visibility depends on commercial indexes and substantial fees. An infrastructure may be open in access, governance and authorship conditions, yet remain institutionally undervalued because it does not occupy the dominant circuits of recognition. Conversely, a commercial platform may be described as open because its articles are freely readable, even when participation remains unaffordable for many institutions.
ArchiveFatigue names the material exhaustion that develops within this unequal ecology. Public scholarly infrastructures require continuous editorial, technical, administrative and bibliographic labour. Librarians, editors, translators, developers and university departments maintain repositories and journals over decades, often without secure funding or professional recognition. When these systems struggle, their difficulty is frequently cited as evidence that public models are unsustainable. Yet the exhaustion does not necessarily originate in the model itself. It may result from a funding environment that systematically rewards commercial consolidation while expecting public alternatives to survive through fragmented grants and invisible labour.
The language of sustainability can therefore become circular. Public infrastructures are underfunded, their maintainers become exhausted, and the resulting fragility is used to justify migration towards commercial systems that promise permanence. Stability is purchased by transferring ownership, data and governance to institutions whose dominance helped produce the weakness of the alternative in the first place. ArchiveFatigue is not merely technical deterioration. It is a political distribution of maintenance.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies reveals why this question cannot be restricted to publishing economics. Research has historically operated as an instrument for extracting, classifying and appropriating the knowledge of colonised peoples. Data, objects, languages and cultural practices were removed from communities and converted into academic authority elsewhere. Contemporary open-data mandates can reproduce this pattern when they require unrestricted deposit without asking who controls reuse, attribution, interpretation or commercial application.
A dataset may be openly available and still participate in enclosure. Openness does not guarantee reciprocity. Nor does universal access necessarily protect communities whose knowledge was produced under conditions of trust, collective ownership or restricted transmission. The demand that all data should circulate freely can become another universal norm imposed by institutions with greater capacity to collect, process and monetise what others have produced. Decolonising open science therefore requires more than expanding access. It requires a different account of ownership, consent, recognition and return. The central question is not only whether a document or dataset can be downloaded, but who established the terms of circulation, who benefits from reuse, whose categories structure the archive and whether the communities involved retain authority over future interpretations.
RadicalEducation locates the point at which this transformation must become habitual. Researchers should be trained from the beginning to understand citation, publication, deposit and data sharing as ethical and political operations rather than neutral technical procedures. Citation distributes visibility. Journal choice supports one infrastructure rather than another. Metadata determines what can be found. Authorship decides whose labour becomes legible. Acknowledgement can honour collaboration, but it can also conceal intellectual work that should have received full credit.
This education would require researchers to ask concrete questions. Is there a rigorous public or non-commercial venue available? Does an open-data requirement respect collective ownership and contextual integrity? Who performs the maintenance labour that keeps the repository operational? Which languages and regional journals have been excluded from the literature review because dominant databases failed to index them? Whose concepts are treated as theory, and whose appear merely as local evidence?
These questions do not reject technical sustainability. Computing infrastructure must reduce its environmental burden. Research institutions should measure energy consumption, material extraction and the climate effects of digital storage. But ecological accounting should be integrated with institutional and epistemic accounting. A data centre powered by renewable energy can still support an extractive scholarly economy. A low-carbon repository can still reproduce asymmetries of visibility, ownership and authority.
Sustainable science is therefore not a thermostat. It cannot be verified solely through degrees, kilowatt-hours or emissions per computation. These indicators describe part of the material system, but they do not describe who owns the means of scholarly legibility: who determines what counts as published, indexed, cited and professionally valuable knowledge. A system may achieve excellent environmental performance while remaining inaccessible to researchers whose institutions cannot pay its fees or satisfy its standards of recognition.
The three operators clarify the structure of the problem. SemanticHardening identifies the moment when “open” ceases to challenge enclosure and becomes one of its administrative products. SystemicLock explains why this contradiction survives across publishing, indexing, funding and evaluation even after it has been widely recognised. ArchiveFatigue reveals how the labour of sustaining public alternatives is exhausted and then used as evidence against their viability. RadicalEducation supplies the beginning of a counter-practice by turning publication, citation and data governance into explicit questions of reciprocity and institutional form.
The objective is not to replace one universal model of open science with another. Different forms of knowledge require different conditions of circulation. Some materials should be globally accessible; others require community governance, delayed release, restricted reuse or forms of attribution that conventional repositories cannot represent. Decolonisation begins when openness stops functioning as an abstract moral absolute and becomes a negotiated relation between producers, infrastructures, publics and forms of responsibility.
The decisive question for every mandate, metric and repository is therefore not simply whether it is open or environmentally efficient. It is whose form it embodies, who designed its rules, who owns its infrastructure, whose labour maintains it and which bodies of knowledge become visible through it. It must also ask who remains exposed when those rules fail. The case of Diego Gómez matters because it prevents open science from becoming a self-congratulatory institutional slogan. It returns the discussion to the material risk of circulation.
A publishing system cannot call itself sustainable merely because its servers consume less energy while its structures of access, recognition and ownership remain extractive. Decolonising open science means transforming the form through which knowledge becomes public: its economic model, its systems of evaluation, its practices of citation, its treatment of community knowledge and its distribution of maintenance. The task is not to cool an inherited apparatus. It is to determine whether that apparatus should continue to govern scholarly life at all.
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