At PublisherSpeak US 2025, Katherine Skinner, Director of Programs at Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI), delivered a keynote that challenged fundamental assumptions about open infrastructure in scholarly communications. Using the fairy tale "The Emperor's New Clothes" as her framework, Skinner methodically dismantled three persistent illusions that continue to shape—and constrain—the publishing landscape.
Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash
The Crossroads Moment
Skinner opened by acknowledging that scholarly communication stands at an unusual moment. "Big, seismic decision points like this are not normal," she explained, noting that human systems typically resist change once norms are established. Yet both open infrastructure and publishing are experiencing genuine crossroads moments, offering opportunities for industry transformation rather than business as usual.
This isn't just theoretical positioning. The foundations of knowledge creation and sharing are shaking under the weight of massive funding cuts. As of her September 2025 talk, Grant Witness reported that NIH grant terminations had eliminated $4.52 billion in funding, with NSF adding nearly another billion dollars in lost funding. As she noted, these amount to unanticipated and immediate revenue losses for awardees’ organizations, undercutting their solvency in the current fiscal year. "The collateral damage is immense," Skinner noted, describing it as "wickedly hard to see because it is everywhere and nowhere, all at once."
Illusion One: There's Not Enough Money
The first and perhaps most pervasive illusion Skinner tackled is the belief that insufficient funding exists to support open infrastructure. "It wasn't ever true, actually, that there wasn't enough money in the system," she declared. "STRATEGY, not money, has been the missing piece."
The reality? Substantial resources are being squandered on duplicative software development, with many publishing entities essentially recreating similar wheels. Skinner illustrated this through the preprint landscape, where IOI has worked extensively with platforms like arXiv. Almost every preprint service we’ve engaged with shoulders technology and staffing costs in isolation, building similar functionality using different tools, with different staff, and different funders. While some diversity of approaches makes sense—especially in developing environments—the current volume of parallel efforts is unsustainable.
"We cannot afford to keep building lots of tools and approaches rather than cultivating infrastructure," Skinner emphasized. The proliferation documented in resources like "101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication" and IOI's Infra Finder tool (now tracking 112+ open infrastructures) reveals a fragmented landscape where resources are spread too thin.
Most troubling is what Skinner called the "typical trajectory" of open infrastructure: grant-funded projects that begin "in the red," subsidized by institutional salaries for proposal writers, then cycle through repeated grant applications while running on insufficient resources. "Nearly every open infrastructure I’ve worked with is running on less money than it needs, relying on volunteer time and ageing code," she reported from her extensive consulting work, adding that this is "even (especially?) true for open infrastructures that are heavily subsidized by a long-term funder or host."
Illusion Two: Open Solutions Are Too Risky
The second illusion posits that open solutions are inherently risky for commercial adoption and investment. Skinner flipped this narrative, arguing that open solutions actually reduce risk across sectors and business models.
Publishers face numerous genuine risks: loss of key technical staff, undiscovered code problems, technical debt accumulation, security vulnerabilities, and disruptive AI bot crawls. "Creating and running your own system is a hard job for any publisher," whether university press, library publisher, society, small commercial publisher, or large conglomerate.
The solution? Look to other industries. Skinner cited examples from cloud computing (where AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud contributed to core technologies like Kubernetes), the automotive industry (where BMW, Volkswagen, and Mercedes cooperate on open source projects for software-defined vehicles), and finance (where Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley have open-sourced internally developed platforms).
"In none of these cases have any of the entities involved given up their competitiveness," Skinner noted. Instead, they've built structures—often nonprofit foundations with clear governance rules—that protect their interests while providing base infrastructure, allowing them to build specialized, competitive advantages on top.
"I think that publishers are suffering from being 'in the software business,'" she concluded. Shared infrastructure could alleviate the exhausting build-maintain-update cycles, especially crucial in a narrowing financial climate.
Illusion Three: Nonprofit Equals Values-Aligned
Perhaps most provocatively, Skinner challenged the binary thinking that divides nonprofits (presumed good) from for-profits (presumed bad). "There are values aligned for-profits and totally money-grabbing nonprofits out there," she stated plainly. "These are business types, not evaluation criteria for some kind of 'goodness'."
The presumption of alignment based on tax status does a disservice to the field, particularly when business logic gets confused with values. Yes, different pressures and expectations exist between sectors, but "they are not binary. They are not neat and tidy."
Skinner highlighted various initiatives attempting to articulate and assess values and principles—frameworks like CHAOSS, Standards for Excellence, the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, FOREST, and others. "We need to get clear about what we value and what we demand of ourselves and our tools, regardless of what business model they choose."
The Path Forward: Strategic Collaboration
Skinner closed by sharing her hope that strategic collaboration will enable scholarly communication and publishing stakeholders to collectively study and respond to the mounting problems of scale and affordability of open infrastructures. IOI's March/April 2025 pulse poll of newsletter subscribers revealed dense interconnectivity between infrastructures, even with limited data. The visualization showed meaningful patterns in how users depend on multiple infrastructures simultaneously. "We need to better understand" these relationships, Skinner urged, both between infrastructures and between infrastructures and user groups.
The challenge ahead requires decisive action. "Without decisive change, the open infrastructure ecosystem as it stands risks dissipating its resources across too many fragile projects, leaving itself vulnerable to political pressures, funding shocks, and institutional attrition," Skinner warned. And that action requires a better diversity of players - one that enables stakeholders using different business models and modes of operation to flourish, in part by engaging in new types of partnerships and collaborations.
The opportunity exists. With broader coalitions and work to mend historical divisions, "the community has the opportunity to build a more coherent, resilient, and – dare I say it – equitable system of scholarly communication."
Conclusion
Skinner's keynote posed urgent questions: How do we support open efforts without expecting them to happen for free? What governance structures work across stakeholder groups? How do we create structures where competition and collaboration coexist? Who needs to be at the table?
In an era of rising authoritarianism, environmental crisis, and financial uncertainty, the need for open, distributed, and sustainable infrastructures has never been greater. Meeting this need requires not only technical solutions but cultural shifts: challenging illusions, making strategic choices, and acting collectively for the preservation and advancement of open knowledge.