The 'Fauxpen' Trap: Why Community Governance is the Only Antidote to the Predatory Pivot

The Mirage of Reliability

Scholarly publishing is currently obsessed with a dangerous synonym: equate "corporate" with "sustainable." We have been conditioned to believe that a massive balance sheet is the only thing standing between a research output and the digital abyss. But this is a calculated delusion. The reality is that the move toward high-volume, automated publishing mirrors the very predatory practices we claim to despise. When we prioritize corporate sustainability over community governance, we aren't building a foundation; we are building a gilded cage.

The 'Fauxpen' Pivot and the Integrity Gap

Geoff Bilder recently dropped a term at the FORCE11 conference in Los Angeles that should make every editor break out in a cold sweat: "Fauxpen" infrastructure. This goes deeper than bad code or slow servers. It is a fundamental rot in the record of science. We are watching a bizarre merger where elite publishers mimic the high speed, high volume tricks of the scammers, all while hiding behind their heavy mahogany desks and historical legitimacy.

They use the language of trust, marketing their "rigorous" workflows, while simultaneously scaling to a point where human oversight becomes a mathematical impossibility. If an infrastructure isn't community owned and transparent, it is merely a predatory pipeline with better branding. The pivot to Open Access has, in many corners, become a pivot to extractive rent seeking.

Game Theory and the Death of Sanctity

The FORCE11 gathering back in action after five years (huge thanks to Todd A. Carpenter for the rundown) also stirred up some sharp talk about the "game theory" of multiple submissions. Ethics boards love to moralize about authors hitting send on three journals at once. But let's be honest. Who actually broke the trust here first?

Authors are reacting to a marketplace that has devalued their time while hyper-inflating the cost of "prestige." When a journal takes six months to deliver a rejection from a single overworked reviewer, the "predatory" behavior isn't the author's, it is the system's. We have created a vacuum of integrity where the slow, opaque nature of traditional publishing acts as a recruitment poster for predatory journals that promise (and deliver) speed.

The Architecture of Accountability

If we want to kill this mess, we have to stop handing over our metadata and our loyalty to the wrong people. Real change requires two structural shifts.

1. The Decoupling of Curation from Hosting

We must stop allowing publishers to own both the "gate" and the "road." We need a system where community-governed infrastructure (the road) hosts the content, and independent, faculty-led boards (the gate) provide the peer review as a detached service. This eliminates the financial incentive for a publisher to lower standards to increase volume.

2. Radical Portability of Peer Review

When a manuscript is rejected at Journal A, the work done by reviewers shouldn't just vanish. That effort needs to be portable. Authors should own their review data, or the community should. Scammers thrive because the current system is so wasteful and secretive. If we make review history open and transferable, we drain the swamp of hidden rejections that keeps the predatory machine running.

Sustainability isn't a line item in a corporate budget. It is the proof of a community that refuses to be sold back its own knowledge. If the infrastructure isn't ours, the science isn't either.