Why this matters works on two levels. For scholarship, there is a real blind spot. The theory of academic capitalism was built around rich, central systems, and most studies still look at single universities making money from patents or spin-offs. Almost no one has examined a whole national system on the periphery, where the state, not the market, is the main driving force, and where universities earn very little beyond their public funding. By bringing together the theory of academic capitalism and world-systems analysis, the project opens up a part of the map that has been left out. The social stakes are just as concrete. The way Polish science was reformed decides who gets funded, what counts as good research, which journals scholars are pushed toward, and whether the country builds its own scientific base or keeps supplying the centres. Knowing how we got here is the starting point for any honest debate about where the system should go next.

The work is split into seven connected parts. Each one takes on a different piece of the puzzle.

1. 1. Building the theory. The first part lays the foundations: reading the two theoretical traditions (academic capitalism theory and dependency theory/world system analysis) side by side, finding where their vocabularies overlap, and producing new concepts that fit a peripheral system. This runs through the whole project and feeds everything else.

   2. Reading the policy. The team assembles an archive of laws, draft bills, ministry papers and reports stretching back to 1990, then splits the history into four turning points. One of them is the stretch around 1999, when Poland signed the Bologna Declaration and began lining its universities up with the rest of Europe ahead of EU accession. Interviews with “people who were there” during the big decisions fill in what the documents leave out.

   3. Following the middlemen. Between the government and the universities sits a whole layer of organisations – ranking firms, private foundations, industry lobbyists, data companies, publishers – that quietly shape how the system runs. The project builds 22 case studies of these players and traces how each one got its foot in the door.

   4. Mapping resistance. Academic capitalism was not waved through without protest. Academics and students went on strike, marched, and occupied buildings. Because no one has ever gathered this systematically, the team creates a brand-new database from the two newspapers that published without interruption across the entire period, Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita – picked on purpose for their opposing political leanings – and counts and analyses every protest event mention from 1990 to 2021.

   5. The instructions from abroad. Bodies like the OECD, the World Bank and the European Commission write reports and recommendations that nudge governments toward particular reforms, often presented as neutral expert advice. This part collects what they said about Poland and checks how much of it actually ended up in Polish law, and how it impacted the form the local academic capitalism took.

   6. Inside the universities. Here the project zooms in on six institutions – comprehensive and technical universities in Warsaw, Poznań and Łódź – to see how much of the “capitalist” machinery really took hold: commercialisation offices, spin-off companies, stronger management, and so on. Interviews with rectors, deans and union representatives flesh out each case.

   7. The publishing giants. A handful of companies – Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Sage, Wiley-Blackwell – own most of the prestigious journals, and scholars everywhere are pushed to publish with them. Using data from Scopus, the team measures how much of Polish researchers’ output lands in journals controlled by this oligopoly. There is a twist here: early data suggests Polish authors have been drifting away from the big five toward a newer player, MDPI, which runs against the global trend and says something about how a peripheral system behaves.

By the time the project wraps up, we should be able to say with evidence, how academic capitalism really took shape in a country on the edge of global science. We will know which reforms pushed Polish universities toward market behaviour and which ones quietly stalled, and why a system run mostly by the state ended up looking different from the textbook American or British case. We will know who the unseen players were in this story, the ranking firms, foundations, lobbyists and publishers that shaped the rules from the side, and how much sway organisations like the OECD or the European Commission actually had over Polish law. We will have a real record of the protests and refusals that pushed back, something that has never been collected before. And we will have a much clearer picture of how Poland’s research got pulled into the orbit of a few global publishing companies, and what it means when a peripheral system starts drifting in its own direction. Put together, this should give us the first proper account of what “peripheral” academic capitalism is, and a sharper sense of whether Polish science is building something of its own or mostly feeding someone else’s.