Beyond Platforms and Protocols: Funding the Human Layer of Infrastructure

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Beyond Platforms and Protocols: Funding the Human Layer of Infrastructure

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Jonny Coates

June 9, 2026

. 10:00 AM<br>6 min read<br>https://doi.org/10.54900/yjt80-t3t75

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Photo by Tim King / Unsplash

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.<br>Scholarly infrastructure does not treat advocacy and education as infrastructure.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>This work is slow. It is relational. It often looks invisible from the outside. And crucially, it is rarely funded properly, if at all.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>That mindset creates a structural problem for reform efforts. We invest heavily in designing systems but comparatively little in cultivating the people capable...