9. Paradoxes of Openness

Open scholarly infrastructures were built on a radically enabling promise: that removing barriers to access would democratise scientific knowledge and challenge concentrations of power. This chapter examines how that promise has been unsettled. Drawing on the concept of the paradox of openness (Keller and Tarkowski 2021), it argues that openness does not operate in a vacuum but is always situated within existing structures of power. Under conditions of concentrated computational capacity and platform dominance, open resources flow disproportionately to those best positioned to exploit them at scale. The chapter traces how this paradox unfolds across three domains: open access publishing, research data infrastructures, and benchmarking. It shows how each exposes open resources to asymmetric extraction while the costs of maintenance remain locally anchored. It then examines the constraints shaping governance options: temporal mismatches between stewardship and extraction, infrastructural dependencies on concentrated computational power, and the absence of open scholarly infrastructures from broader debates on digital sovereignty. The discussion points toward emerging arrangements, such as differentiated access regimes, redistributive mechanisms, federated architectures, that attempt to reconstitute reciprocity where openness has become decoupled from the communities sustaining it.