Thomas Herve Mboa Nkoudou considers how the Open Access movement has played out on the African continent, with specific focus on sub-Saharan countries. He argues that open access is not necessarily an unfettered good in these regions, unlike the popular social good / equalizing / emancipatory qualities many open access advocates have claimed for years. Rather, Nkoudou suggests, open access has increased access to western research and heralded in profit-making strategies like Article Processing Charges that have further excluded researchers outside of North American and European contexts. He concludes that in order to redesign open access to truly benefit all, researchers need to emphasize epistemic justice and a decolonial approach to knowledge production and sharing.

 

Work cited

Nkoudou, Thomas Herve Mboa. 2020. “Epistemic Alienation in African Scholarly Communications: Open Access as a Pharmakon.” In Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Politics, and Global Politics of Open Access, edited by Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray, 25–40. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.