Academic publishing is not a neutral habitat.

This indictment holds from every position on the spectrum. To the market liberal, this is rent extraction from a captive market. To the Marxist, it’s enclosure of a collectively produced commons. To the institutionalist, a stewardship of public good that’s been corrupted in its delivery. It’s a form of infrastructure built to circulate knowledge, organised to restrict it.

Publishers may counterargue and claim value through: coordination, preservation, and distribution. But even granting this claim, the arrangement fails on the principle of proportion; what’s added is nowhere near what’s been extracted. And whether the value is tenable itself invites scrutiny: Is it really distribution when it stops at a steep paywall? Is it preservation when it hides behind permissions? Is it coordination of labour when the labour has no remuneration? These are questions to which traditional academic publishing has no convincing answer, and they form the bedrock of its original economic sin.

While technical registers are legitimate inventions — we do need jargon to explain things to each other more easily — jargon has also evolved to become an instrument of risk-avoidance: a form in which everything can be said, and nothing has to be ventured necessarily.

Other forms learned to travel between the difficult and the popular without surrendering their complexity. Cinema learned. Music, fashion, games, and memes learned. Academic knowledge never did; it stayed sealed inside its own register. The stakes of that failure are high, since what cultural partitioning does is sever theory (academia) from praxis (a pool of people who can take the ideas forward, and do something about them). Knowledge that circulates only inside institutions has a harder time reaching sites where it could morph into something else: a climate model becoming a legal-tech app adopted at the level of the UN, a paper on indigenous robots inspiriting indigenous communities to build their own, a monograph on mutual aid becoming a neighbourhood’s operating manual. The gap between theory and reality stays open, and the result carries a certain irony: not knowledge cut off from culture, but culture cut off from its own knowledge.

UFP’s logic goes: if we don’t reliably get that volitional energy from our schools and universities, why not liberate ideas’ innovative potential toward a broader range of characters and demographic groups — those who can do it, and do it better?

The assembly line produced by academic publishing changes what knowledge is. Its products become fungible, i.e., any instantiation can substitute for any other. Further, AI can now produce a passable journal article. But more than an intellectual threat, it’s a verdict and a diagnosis of what has already gone wrong: if AI can mimic academic work so easily, it is because so much academic work was already mimetic.

If we want knowledge that is genuinely insightful, original, and unreplicable, the answer is different material conditions, and the deliberate permutation-and-combination of creative ones.

Why does the assembly line persist? In part because once somebody produces a genre, the genre forms a market audience and validates itself. A genre generates the criteria by which its own instances are judged, so a formulaic article is rewarded for conforming to the formula, the way a rom-com is judged against its template and praised for meeting it. This same mechanism governs how fields absorb their breakthroughs. A genuine conceptual turn arrives — the embodied turn, the affective turn, for example — and what comes after is a decade of the same insight restated across new datasets, with the repetition counted as progress. Demand for the familiar doesn’t run out, and it does not necessarily bear resemblance to truth and rigour.

Ideas that are spatial, associative, embodied, or non-linear must be translated into the article’s grammar before they count as knowledge — or outsourced to artistic domains — and the translation flattens the very relations that made them intelligible. This is cognitive foreclosure: not the rejection of an argument once it has entered the institution, but the elimination of possible arguments before they can take an admissible form. The exclusion happens before peer review ever begins. Sometimes an argument is forced into a linear sequence that misrepresents its real structure. Sometimes a thinker looks at what the translation would cost, concludes it would destroy the thought, and shelves the idea. Sometimes the person simply leaves the academy, because no available format can hold what they know — which explains the attrition rate in contemporary academia.

The neurodivergent case makes this plainest. It is not a plea for inclusion; it is the clearest demonstration of how the rule works. When an institution recognises only one route to insight, it starts mistaking conformity of expression for quality of mind. And when one format controls how knowledge is allowed to move, the damage does not stop at circulation. It reaches into what can be thought at all: over time, fields learn to ask only the questions their authorised forms can accommodate. The loss is civilisational, and it can’t even be counted — entire categories of insight never get produced, and what never took citable form leaves no palpable record behind.

Test it as function, and it runs into the same kind of failure. Every design is built for a purpose, and this system appears to be designed for what UFP calls stock — that is to say: accumulating, sitting still, gatekeeping. However, this is contradictory to its original telos, which is to be a communication and exchange system. So if it’s meant to be excellent at circulation, why is its design best for stockpiling? There’s an incongruence between the desired goal and the design meant to reach it. In that sense, it fails another design test.

Good design typically has a provenance that is customised to the praxis of its primary demographic user. In academic publishing, that is the intellectual. Typically, a good designer should test, iterate, and prototype their offering with the demographic user. But a deep dive into the history of academic publishing shows this was never the case. The journal article began in 1665, as the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: scholarly correspondence between gentlemen, bound into a periodical because the letters were piling up and the printing press could distribute them faster than hand-copying. The form was a solution to a distribution problem, shaped by what the press could print and what the post could carry. No philosopher of knowledge designed it; it endured because it was the most convenient vessel for paper. Three centuries later, salesmen appropriated the convenience: Pergamon built the commercial machinery and sold it to Elsevier for £440 million, and the inherited convenience was sanctified into canon. Across 361 years, the primary user was never consulted, tested, or prototyped for. This is the deepest failure, because it explains the other two: the apparatus was never designed for thought at all.

However, somewhere along the way, this innocent index became a sort of currency that was slotted into metric thinking. It got quantified and gamified, and citation counts now decide hiring, funding, promotion, and prestige. An innocent bookkeeping tool got promoted into a component-part that measures the worth of a mind. And what any system can measure, it ends up governing.

Ultimately, a tool that is a foot soldier of intellectual property regimes doesn’t answer questions of knowledge and truth. Because it governs, scholars learn to optimise for what it can count: publishing in the indexed venues, citing the expected names, slicing one finding across five papers to multiply the entries. The address book fills while the ideas thin out. Meanwhile, the questions that actually matter to knowledge don’t have a column in this ledger: Where did the idea travel, who absorbed it and how deeply? What did it change once it left the page? Has the rolling stone gathered any moss — impact, emotional force, deeper absorption into a small group, or a big one? A citation can tell you where a claim is filed and who owns it. It doesn’t really say anything about what the claims set in motion in their afterlife.

Which is why we’re building a different instrument — one that measures the life of an idea rather than its address: its provenance, its lineage, its hermeneutic force. Independent and grassroots scholars have mounted alternatives for decades; none has been deployed at scale. From 2027, ours becomes the official citation system of works published in UFP. More on this on Alt-CINDEX.