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

This data essay interrogates how the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), a seemingly neutral technical standard, operates as a mechanism that can reinforce structural inequalities in scholarly publishing, even as it is increasingly invoked to promote the visibility of African scientists in global scientific knowledge production.

Context

I have long been interested in how research practices are experienced as extractive and exploitative in Kenya and the potential that sharing of research has to refresh the social contract of qualitative research. While recent calls in scholarly publishing have emphasized the need to make science more “equitable and inclusive” (Raju et al. 2023), I remain wary of what increasingly appears as “equity washing," - symbolic gestures toward inclusion that avoid confronting the structural foundations of inequality.

In recent years, I have observed a proliferation of programs aimed at increasing the number of African researchers represented in global scientific spaces. For instance, the launch of Scientific African in 2018, a new open-access journal dedicated to African research, was hailed as a critical intervention. Its editor-in-chief proclaimed: "This is the place for scientists who want to create the Africa we want to stand up and be counted." Yet, the journal is published by Elsevier and requires an Article Processing Charge (APC) of nearly $600 per article, a fee that is out of reach for many African scholars.

These efforts focus narrowly on representation within existing systems, but greater representation alone does not disrupt the extractive structures of higher education and knowledge production. Global scholarly publishing has been dominated by a handful of powerful publishers since at least the 1970s (Larivière et al., 2015). While these publishers may open their platforms to scholars from the so-called “global South,” they continue to control the policies, infrastructures, and profit models of academic publishing, thus reproducing their dominance.

The Case of the DOI

While the dominance of major commercial publishers has drawn increasing critique (van Bellen et al., 2024; Posada & Chen, 2018), less scholarly attention has been paid to the political economy of the infrastructures that sustain that dominance. The DOI is a critical example of how infrastructural design encodes power. It is not merely a technical convenience; it is a central organizing mechanism of global scholarly communication, designed to streamline rights management and revenue collection for powerful publishers.

Through the curation and close reading of data artifacts below, DOI governance documents, early promotional materials, and contemporary critical reflections, I trace how the DOI rose to dominance among a range of persistent identifier (PID) schemes. This analysis reveals how mundane technical decisions carry significant geopolitical and economic consequences, structuring whose knowledge circulates, under what terms, and to whose benefit.

Importantly, the DOI is not the only possible infrastructure. The ARK (Archival Resource Key) system is one example of an alternative model built on principles of decentralization, institutional autonomy, and openness. Unlike DOIs, ARKs eliminate usage fees and allow institutions to maintain control over their own identifier namespaces, resisting the commodification of scholarly infrastructure and reasserting knowledge as a public good. This contrast makes clear that infrastructural futures are not foreclosed; they remain sites of active struggle and imagination.

In Closing

Those committed to dismantling inequalities in global science must attend not only to issues of representation, who gets to publish and be cited, but also to deeper questions of ownership and benefit. While calls for more African research are understandable, I argue that we must go beyond increasing outputs within unjust systems and instead invest in building alternative infrastructures, norms, and practices that enable us to “do and be otherwise.” Without rethinking the scholarly infrastructures through which we publish and connect, we risk further entrenching imperial systems under the guise of progress.

The challenge ahead is one of collective imagination. How might we catalyze and sustain diverse ecologies of knowledge that resist extraction and foster genuine inclusion? This experimental data essay and the broader collaborative process through which this project has emerged represents one such attempt to chart a different, more just path.