From Gatekeepers to Gateways: How Acceleration and Platform Logic Reshape Life‐Science Journals

Key Points Acceleration in life sciences reconfigures journals from curated voices to speed‐optimized, metric‐driven portals, dissolves journal identity, and renders them Augé's ‘non‐places’. Legacy publishers and digital natives converge on speed guarantees and dashboards, prioritizing efficiency over identity. Rising APCs, uneven peer‐review capacity, and shrinking citation half‐lives underscore growing inequities in scholarly communication. Sustaining cumulative, trustworthy science demands governance: integrity audits, transparent cost models, and depth‐focused evaluation.