Academic excellence, in its original meaning (areté), combines intellectual and moral merit, grounded in one’s relevance to and impact on one’s world. However, in the current era of limited time and high-stake competition, social relevance is pre-assumed to trade-off against scientific distinction. This paper is one long argument against such excellence-relevance trade-off. We first briefly describe the history of academic ‘excellence’ and argue it does not support the current use of the term nor vindicate a necessary community-academia trade-off. Second, we review the current game theory framework for addressing community-academia interactions. We argue that due to its pre-assumed trade-off, it often entrenches an unjust hierarchy between science and society, even when motivated by honest goodwill and ending with reciprocal “win-win” benefits. Given these difficulties, in the third section we present a practical alternative, a case study of “Town Square Academia”, which operates in peripheral and heterogenic communities. We review its success and failures in the attempt to combine excellence with relevance, and argue for expanding such attempts. To conclude, given the importance of bridging the gap between science and society, even if scientific excellence only sometimes manages to unite with social and environmental relevance, it should all ways be attempted before rolled out.

We follow two biodiversity knowledge infrastructures that hold conceptual and practical inner tensions, and we argue that some of these diffi culties emerge from overlooking local information and different understandings of the term location. The ambiguity emerges from two basic concepts of space – exogenous and interactionist – that are both necessary yet readily suggest inconsistent practices – global standardization and local fl exibility – to organize location records. Researchers in both infrastructures fi rst standardized, digitized and globalized their records, then discovered inner tensions, and fi nally alternated between globally interoperable and locally fl exible records. Our story suggests a broader lesson: since both types of ‘location’ information are necessary; and since vast resources were already invested in globalizing knowledge infrastructures; then investing in local knowledge infrastructures and in alternating between both types of memory practices seems the most rational option, and a good way to resist epistemic injustice affl icting local knowledge in peripheral localities.Keywords: biodiversity, database, epistemic-injustice