Catherine Ahearn

Infrastructures are more than the tools we use, they are a part of the process and we trust them to function properly.

The dominant commercial model in scholarly publishing isn’t serving the academy or humanity well, and instead extracts enormous profits from a mostly publicly-funded endeavor,, replicating society’s inherent biases in its assessments of quality. It must be met, if not with a replacement, then with viable alternatives that center the public good over profit, diverse perspectives over ivory tower monocultures, and effective communication over monetizable assets.

With the COVID-19 pandemic now among us, much has been circulating about ways to stay healthy. From sharing 20-second songs to sing while washing your hands, to defining and understanding social distancing, society is rightfully making broad changes in the name of staying healthy and slowing the spread of coronavirus. Publishers of research that could be leveraged toward developing a vaccine for the virus are also making changes. Some are ungating articles related to the disease.