Ingrid Robeyns at Crooked Timber with her view from the “South”:
If the information I get from (associate) editors of journals who explicitly encourage submission of papers from the South is representative, then the problem can be sketched like this: Scholars living and working in the South are submitting papers that contain interesting empirical information about the areas they live in, or interesting interpretations and analyses of issues that are different from the analysis one would hear from a typical ‘Northerner’. Yet these papers are not up to date with recent theoretical developments or other relevant published literature, and are also not written in the ‘style’ of mainstream academic articles. So almost all these papers get rejected. (Of course there are, in absolute numbers, enough exceptions; but if we’d look at percentages, I’d think this is a fair sketch of the problem).
Clearly this is not a fair game: these authors have to meet our quality standards but they are working under much harder conditions (like power cuts), and with only a fraction of the resources we are having at our disposal (not just money, but also books and journals, and the quality of the education they enjoyed themselves). In short, the access barriers to academic journals are one significant factor contributing to global academic inequalities. One more reason to support open access.
Take a look!
