At this year’s BiblioCon, I gave a talk on the growing pressure on open knowledge and the changing conditions under which scientific knowledge is produced, disseminated, accessed, and trusted.
For many years, debates around Open Access and Open Science focused primarily on participation, accessibility, and transparency. Openness was often treated as a normative and technical goal: knowledge should be accessible, reusable, and shared as broadly as possible.
Yet the current situation suggests that openness is not merely a technical infrastructure or ethical principle. It is also politically, economically, and institutionally fragile.
The talk explored how de-funding, political interference, geopolitical fragmentation, and artificial intelligence increasingly shape the conditions of scholarly communication. Political actors influence research not only through funding priorities, but also through strategic non-funding and institutional pressure. Mechanisms traditionally associated with scientific quality assurance — peer review, indexing systems, rankings, and journal prestige — are themselves socially embedded structures that are vulnerable to bias and political influence.
At the same time, geopolitical tensions increasingly affect access to supposedly open knowledge infrastructures. Researchers from politically rival states may face restrictions in accessing data, infrastructures, or collaborations that were originally envisioned as globally open.
Artificial intelligence introduces an additional layer of complexity. Journals, repositories, and preprint servers are confronted with AI-generated manuscripts, fabricated submissions, large-scale automated scraping, and massive bot traffic. Protective measures may become necessary to preserve infrastructure stability and scientific integrity — but these measures also raise uncomfortable questions about whether established concepts of openness can remain unchanged under current conditions.
One of the central questions of the talk was therefore whether we need to reconsider how we conceptualize “open knowledge” under these evolving circumstances, and what role scholarly communities can play in safeguarding the integrity and reliability of scientific communication.
In this context, academic libraries play a particularly important role: not only as providers of infrastructure, but also as curators of trustworthy information, stewards of long-term knowledge preservation, and institutional actors committed to sustainable access to scholarly knowledge.
Many thanks to everyone at BiblioCon for the discussions and exchanges around these issues.
The presentation slides are now available here:
Herb, U. (2026, May 19). Offenes Wissen unter Druck: Produktion, Einflussnahme, Access-Blocking und Integrität. BiblioCon, Berlin. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20286673 or here.