The fractured look of the processes of knowledge management ends up having unfortunate implications on the national and institutional policies related to it. In turn, these result in decisions with consequences that deepen the inequalities of countries with few financial, technological, informational and educational resources. Because of this, it is necessary to search for ecosystemic views that allow having an integral perspective.
First, context analysis allows the asymmetries between countries to be tested in terms of their socio-economic, political, legal, and even cultural-historical conditions. For example, in the United States of America, Germany, Japan and China, which are countries that have over two centuries of consolidated infrastructures of knowledge, the investment in science and technology is seen as a capital that sustains the survival and competitiveness of these nations. In other words, these investments are strategic instead of being seen as a cost since it additionally impacts food companies, biomedicine (pharmaceutical and medical equipment), energy, mobility, communications and information, armaments, and even in those that control social matters.
This is contrary to countries that due to their historical conditions of dependence, have been forced to stop strategic development processes in areas such as nuclear energy or biomedicine. Not to mention that part of the researchers who do not return from their excellency formation centers, but become part of the so-called ”brain drain” since they end up being recruited by these institutions. Not to speak about other areas where investment in technology to research becomes unattainable due to the equipment costs, or, as has happened in recent years, that information infrastructure costs are so high that countries have to pay unmentionable amounts, which have made that even the wealthiest nations protest against these monopolies of information. This is reflected in the Leiden Manifest (
It is evident that these asymmetries make it absurd to transfer policies as ways of governance from contexts as those to others where similar or comparable conditions do not exist. Neither is sustainable to try to incorporate evaluation exigencies to groups, researchers and editors of those contexts to ours, and even less to appropriate their metrics.
On the other hand, the actors responsible for education and research are central to the ecosystems of knowledge. They include, besides researchers, administrative staff who, in the case of the private universities, are subject to pressure from the markets, especially from marketing derived from the rankings and accreditation systems. In the case of public universities, they are subject to financial resources according to the standards that are generally imposed by policies that privilege political and economic interests of the government in charge.
The management of these ecosystems are expressed, as mentioned previously, regarding the communities, companies and government, which are users and demandants of knowledge that act as regulators of the system.
The system regulations are fundamentally related to resources that are the ones that guide and determined, and not on few occasions, researchers financing (salaries and incentives), research (privilege or deleted thematics from the research agenda), innovations (patents and registries), doctoral studies, research technologies (laboratories and research instruments), and knowledge infrastructures (libraries and journals databases). This might assure or bias the diverse types of appropriations.