Decades of work have gone into the development of platforms for scholarly communication that are designed to facilitate the greatest possible openness for circulating the knowledge that scholars and practitioners produce today. The goal of many of these platforms has been returning control of the processes of scholarly communication to scholars and their institutions, breaking the corporate stranglehold on the dissemination of knowledge. Those platforms, however, frequently depend on infrastructures that are similarly corporate-owned and controlled. As a result, the long-term sustainability of scholarly work relies at the deepest levels on the continued interest and goodwill of infrastructure providers (such as Amazon Web Services) whose goals and values are radically different from our own. This talk will explore what our dependence on corporate communications infrastructures may mean for the future of scholarly communication, as well as ways that academic institutions might become better able to take control of their own infrastructural needs.

1. infrastructure
2. knowledge production
3. scholarly communication

This talk was delivered on June 17, 2024, as part of Creative Approaches to Open Social Scholarship: Canada, an Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership Gathering in Montreal, Quebec, Canada: https://inke.ca/creative-approaches-to-open-social-scholarship-canada/.