"Who Owns Our Knowledge Infrastructure: Demystifying the Politics of the DOI"

This data essay critically examines the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) as a key infrastructure in global scholarly publishing. While often framed as a neutral technical standard, the DOI encodes commercial and geopolitical interests that reproduce structural inequalities. Through close analysis of historical and contemporary artifacts, the essay traces how the DOI emerged from a publisher-driven agenda to protect intellectual property and consolidate control. I highlight how efforts to increase African representation in science risk reinforcing extractive systems when embedded in infrastructures like the DOI. As a counterpoint, the essay surfaces alternative models such as the Archival Resource Key (ARK), which promote decentralization, openness, and institutional autonomy. I argue that addressing inequality requires more than inclusion within dominant systems, rather, it demands reimagining the infrastructures of knowledge production themselves. This piece is part of a broader "Database as Book" project, a collaborative publishing experiment that reimagines the scholarly book as a living, annotated database. Built on the PECE platform, it foregrounds relational, locally grounded forms of knowledge-making over fixed, linear narratives.