On large publishers, AI corporations and the perils of third-party funding: how science is chaining itself

Science is free - one might think at first glance, and that would certainly be desirable. In fact, however, science has repeatedly found itself in problematic dependencies in recent decades. These include dependence on large publishers, which the open access movement is only partially able to resolve, dependence on third-party funding for research as well as reputation, and, more recently, an increasing dependence on commercial AI tools. The keynote address will explore these dependencies and show how they can be broken.