Most science today is published in countries with low ratings for democracy and freedom of the press.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.03.663115v1

"In 2024, countries characterized as full democracies produced only 22% of the Scopus-indexed publications, versus 66% in 2006…78% of publications in 2024 came from countries with problematic (including USA) or worse (including China) freedom of press."

The authors took the democracy ratings from Democracy Index…
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu

…and the freedom of the press ratings from Reporters Without Borders.
https://rsf.org/en/rsf-world-press-freedom-index-2025-economic-fragility-leading-threat-press-freedom

#Democracy#FreeSpeech#ScholComm

Update. This result is particularly disturbing to those of us who believe that science thrives most in free societies, or that freedom of speech reduces the persistence of error and facilitates self-correction in science. I sketched the argument in this 2008 article.
https://dash.harvard.edu/entities/publication/73120378-8bc7-6bd4-e053-0100007fdf3b