Social Justice in Scholarly Publishing: Open Access Is the Only Way: The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol 17, No 10

"The open-access (OA) movement emerged with the hope of making research papers freely accessible to all without any barrier, but the inertia among scientists has hampered progress. For example, three major agencies in India, namely, the Department of Science and Technology, the Department of Biotechnology, and the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research, have open-access mandates that require all researchers working in laboratories under them and those receiving any kind of support from them to place their published papers in institutional repositories, which in turn are harvested by a central repository. However, most researchers do not honor this requirement; nor are the agencies taking any action. As a result, the central repository is not getting populated....

Chattopadhyay and colleagues refer to discrimination that developing-country researchers face in different areas of scholarly communication, such as getting papers accepted in the so-called international journals and being invited to join the editorial boards of these journals. Papers by scientists from Africa, Asia, and Latin America do not get accepted for publication in Western journals as easily as papers from North America and Western Europe. In 1997, New Scientist (November 1, 1997, p. 3) commented on the discrepancies in an editorial. It noted that when it came to choosing manuscripts for publication, editors of reputed international journals would more likely select the one from Harvard in preference to the one from Hydera- bad—even though both manuscripts may be of compara- ble quality. To most editors in the West, Harvard seems a sounder bet than Hyderabad. When refereeing manu- scripts received from journals, the New Scientist editorial says, overly enthusiastic reviews are given to work from friends, friends of friends, and people whose work is already familiar from conferences. More negative reviews go to researchers with unfamiliar names from far-off lands. No wonder many American journals are perceived to be parochial even by European scientists...."