Governing openness: Open Science, metric pressure, and the editorial crisis in the reconfiguration of power in scholarly communication

Abstract

This article analyzes open science as a normative and technical horizon and examines the contemporary crisis of academic publishing under a metrics-and-incentives regime that reshapes what counts as “quality,” who can access publication, and how prestige circulates. Drawing on a selective narrative review of peer-reviewed literature (2021–2026) and on official documents and standards (UNESCO, OECD, European Commission, NIH/OSTP, cOAlition S/Plan S, DOAJ, COPE, Crossref, DataCite, NISO, Clarivate, and Scopus), it argues that openness is not merely a set of practices but an assemblage of infrastructure, governance, and responsible assessment. The article shows that the combination of accelerated editorial flows, opacity in peer review and data, industrial concentration, APC-based economies, and metadata extractivism is amplified by indicators (JIF, CiteScore, SJR/SNIP, h-index, Altmetrics) that operate as dispositifs of power. The work proposes a theoretical reconfiguration: shifting the focus from “changing the journal model” to “changing the regime”—toward open infrastructure, responsible assessment, and political economy—in order to sustain speed and traceability without sacrificing rigor, equity, or epistemic autonomy, with particular attention to Latin American trajectories of diamond open access.