How do platforms discontinue, restrict access, or become unaffordable on timelines researchers do not control?

A subsidiary question under Q-0019. §3.4 documents the platform mechanism in the four-category §3 taxonomy — the most diverse of the four mechanisms because it operates through six distinct sub-modes.

The answer is C-0020. The mechanism is the union of:

• Discontinuation: 191 research data repositories shut down 2012-2023, median age 12 years, 47% with no migration.
• State action: China National Knowledge Infrastructure cut foreign subscribers off from dissertations and statistics in April 2023; CERN terminated cooperation with ~500 Russia-affiliated scientists in November 2024.
• Adversarial governance: GISAID suspended accounts in 2023 after publications it disagreed with; re3data downgraded it from open-access.
• Access fees: UK Biobank's 2023-2024 transition to metered cloud-only roughly doubled project costs.
• API termination: Twitter's February 2023 free academic API removal canceled or pivoted 100+ active research projects across 33,306 studies.
• Commercial capture: Elsevier's Bepress acquisition (2017) put 500+ universities' OA infrastructure under publisher ownership; Mendeley Desktop EOL'd in 2022; Academia.edu's premium tier escalated from $99/year to ~$498/year.

Each mechanism is a different trigger for the same architectural failure: the researcher's data, code, or access depended on one organization's continued decision to provide it, and the organization changed its decision.