Globalization, Open Access, and the Democratization of Knowledge | EDUCAUSE

"In traditional publishing, information inequities are created in a process that some have termed the colonization of information. The flow of information from the Global South3 to the North is characterized as a mining of information, knowledge, data, and heritage to support research conducted in the North. The resulting scholarship then circulates among scholars in the North, with researchers located in the Global South encountering significant barriers to gaining access to and contributing to this circulation of knowledge. As Johannes Britz and Peter Lor note: "From an African perspective a problem arises when this flow [of information] is one-way, i.e. when the researchers subsequently fail to provide the host country with copies of dissertations and research publications arising from their work in that country."4 With the exponential rise of subscription costs for journals published in the North, researchers with neither access to well-resourced libraries nor the means to purchase individual subscriptions have been denied access to the scholarly record...."