Scholarly infrastructure has a problem. In truth, it has several: sustainability, incentives, fragmentation, governance, prestige capture, and the persistent gap between what researchers say they want and what the academic system rewards. But there is another issue that sits underneath many of these failures, one that is rarely discussed, despite shaping the fate of almost every reform effort in the sector.
Scholarly infrastructure does not treat advocacy and education as infrastructure.
Instead, advocacy and education are usually framed as “outreach,” “engagement,” or “communications”, optional extras to be considered once the “real work” is done. Infrastructure projects are expected to build tools, standards, repositories, workflows, or policies, and only later think about how communities might actually understand, adopt, trust, or even use them. That's if they ever include these activities.
But advocacy and education are not accessories to infrastructure. They are part of the infrastructure itself. If researchers do not understand why a tool matters, if institutions are not incentivised to support it, if funders do not communicate its purpose clearly, or if communities are not brought into the process early, then even technically excellent infrastructure will struggle to survive. We have repeatedly mistaken technical completion for successful implementation.
This helps explain why so many reform-oriented efforts in scholarly communication appear to stall. Open access, preprints, data sharing, reproducibility initiatives, persistent identifiers, responsible metrics, open peer review, registered reports; many of these ideas have strong evidence behind them. Some have matured technologically years ago. Yet adoption remains uneven, cultural resistance persists, and communities often remain sceptical or disengaged.
The problem is not always the infrastructure itself. Often, the problem is that nobody funded the work required to help people understand, trust, and integrate it into daily research practice.
Over the last decade, working in preprints and open science advocacy, I have seen this repeatedly. The projects that succeeded were rarely just the projects with the best technology. They were the projects that invested in community-building, education, relationship management, and long-term advocacy. They had experts willing to explain the same concepts hundreds of times, navigate institutional anxieties, respond to misconceptions, and meet researchers where they actually were rather than where reformers wished they would be.
This work is slow. It is relational. It often looks invisible from the outside. And crucially, it is rarely funded properly, if at all.
Part of the reason for this is that advocacy itself is still not widely recognized as a professional skill within scholarly infrastructure. There is often an assumption that good ideas will naturally spread on their own, or that researchers and infrastructure builders can simply “do some communications” alongside their primary work. But effective advocacy is not accidental, and it is not interchangeable with marketing.
Good advocacy requires a deep understanding of research culture, incentives, institutional politics, and community psychology. It requires the ability to translate complex technical or policy issues into meaningful narratives for very different audiences. It involves trust-building, facilitation, diplomacy, coalition-building, strategic framing, public speaking, education design, and long-term relationship management. These are specialised skills developed through experience and practice.
In many ways, advocacy functions as a bridge profession between infrastructure builders and the communities they hope to serve. Without that bridge, even excellent infrastructure can remain disconnected from real-world workflows and researcher priorities.
Yet within academia and scholarly communication, advocacy work is often treated as secondary labour rather than expertise in its own right. People doing this work are frequently expected to operate without stable career paths, institutional recognition, or dedicated funding. In some cases, advocacy is viewed almost as an administrative function rather than as a form of strategic and intellectual labour central to systemic change. For many projects, advocacy is a side-gig or add-on, to be done in the downtime from a persons normal job.
That mindset creates a structural problem for reform efforts. We invest heavily in designing systems but comparatively little in cultivating the people capable of helping communities adopt them.
In scholarly infrastructure, communications funding is frequently tied to already holding a major infrastructure grant. That creates a narrow and self-reinforcing ecosystem. Organizations that historically received infrastructure funding continue to receive communications and engagement funding, even when their expertise has drifted, their priorities have changed, or they are no longer the most effective advocates for the work. Meanwhile, independent advocates, community organisers, educators, translators, and practitioners doing critical adoption work are often excluded because they are not already part of the established funding network.
The result is predictable: infrastructure becomes concentrated around institutions and personalities rather than communities.
As metascience grows as a field, this issue will become even more pressing. We are producing an increasing body of evidence about how science functions, where incentives fail, how publishing shapes behaviour, and which reforms improve reliability or openness. But evidence alone does not change systems. Translation, education and advocacy change systems.
A metascience finding sitting in a paper does not alter research culture unless somebody does the difficult work of communicating it, contextualising it, and helping institutions operationalise it. We would never expect biomedical breakthroughs to improve health outcomes without public health infrastructure, education campaigns, or implementation strategies. Yet scholarly communication reform often behaves as though publishing evidence is enough.
It is not enough.
This is especially important because academia is not a neutral environment for innovation adoption. Researchers operate under intense time pressure, prestige incentives, risk aversion, and institutional constraints. Even reforms that would objectively improve research practice can feel costly or dangerous to individual researchers navigating careers. Advocacy and education are what bridge that gap between systemic benefit and individual action.
And yet this work is persistently undervalued because it is difficult to quantify. Funders can count repositories built, APIs maintained, or datasets deposited. It is much harder to measure trust-building, cultural change, or community understanding, despite these often being the decisive factors in whether infrastructure succeeds.
We need to stop treating adoption as something that happens automatically once infrastructure exists. History shows the opposite. Technologies and standards rarely succeed on technical merit alone. They succeed because communities form around them, because people advocate for them, because users are educated, because institutions are persuaded, and because someone invests in the long-term social work of change.
That means funders need to rethink how they support scholarly infrastructure.
Specifically, funders should create open calls dedicated to advocacy, education, and implementation work within scholarly communication and metascience. Not as side components of infrastructure grants, but as standalone funding streams with equal legitimacy.
Open calls matter because closed funding ecosystems tend to reward incumbency over effectiveness. The same organizations continue receiving support based on historical positioning rather than demonstrated impact or current expertise. Meanwhile, some of the most effective advocates and educators in open science operate independently, across communities, or outside traditional institutional structures entirely. These are some of the best advocates with the biggest impact and yet they’re the ones most likely to be unpaid while project managers are pointlessly moving more promoted projects nowhere.
If we want genuine reform in scholarly communication, we need to fund the people doing the translation work between infrastructure and practice.
Because infrastructure is not only servers, repositories, standards, and governance frameworks. Infrastructure is also trust, understanding, culture and community. And without those things, even the best infrastructure risks becoming another well-intentioned project that researchers never fully adopt.
References
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- Sonabend, R., Carnegie, A., Steele, A. L., Nugent, M., & Sharan, M. (2024). Unicorns Do Not Exist: Employing and Appreciating Community Managers in Open Source (Version 1). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2407.00345
- Beres, G. (2025, June 30). New report charts the evolution and future direction of UK metascience. Research on Research. https://researchonresearch.org/new-report-charts-the-evolution-and-future-direction-of-uk-metascience/
Copyright © 2026 Jonny Coates. Distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
