Market Dynamics, Governance and Open Research Metadata in the AI Era
For policymakers and infrastructure designers in scholarly communication, this reframes the debate around metadata governance, but the contribution is primarily conceptual and incremental.
The paper argues that the tension in scholarly knowledge infrastructure is not between openness and enclosure but between the cost of producing structured metadata and differentiated community demands. It introduces the 'innovation annulus' as a permanent feature and uses a welfare framework analogous to patent life to model trade-offs, yielding testable predictions.
The debate about scholarly knowledge infrastructure has long been framed as a contest between openness and commercial enclosure. This framing distorts both policy and practice. The real tension lies between the persistent cost of producing and refining structured metadata under deep technological friction, and the differentiated demands distinct communities place on data quality, focus and granularity. We introduce the innovation annulus: the zone between freely available structured data and the advancing frontier of commercially refined knowledge products. This zone is a permanent, functional feature of the ecosystem -- not a pathology to eliminate. By analogy with the efficient market hypothesis, its width measures production inefficiency, set by the interplay of friction and demand. Artificial intelligence reshapes the annulus, lowering barriers to basic structuring, raising the threshold at which refinement adds value, and introducing systemic risks through unprovenanced AI-derived metadata. CRediT contributions, funding acknowledgements and AI disclosure statements illustrate the annulus lifecycle. Governance should calibrate the annulus, not abolish it: thin enough to serve research efficiently, wide enough to sustain innovation. A formal welfare framework, analogous to the Nordhaus optimal patent life, characterises the trade-offs and yields testable predictions. The Barcelona Declaration offers a promising forum for boundary governance.