Will academic publishing become more pluralistic thanks to open access? | Open Science

"Recently, I had the pleasure to discuss a couple of interesting problems considering scholarly communication during my interviews with Emanuel Kulczycki and Bo-Christer Björk. The most interesting ones, from my point of view, were those connected to the role of open access in reinforcing an international discussion, or, if you prefer, in making this discussion more balanced. I looked further into this issue and here is a post summarizing some of the most important points from the articles I found related to this problem as well as my thoughts. I hope that I will continue discussing this problem in the future, hopefully supported by an interview with a Latin American researcher. It is not a secret that countries vary in general wealth and in their expenditure on science, and that students and researchers working in less developed countries have fewer opportunities to make a significant input in the scientific discussion. In Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa there is less money for research, and not as many good universities as in Western Europe and the US. Even more striking is the fact that scholarly communication is so inconceivably spatially concentrated. Northern American and Western European publishers provide nearly 90% of all the journal titles indexed by ISI citation databases (McVeigh, 2004: 4), and the large majority of well known journals is based in only four countries: the US, the UK, Germany and the Netherlands. What is more, the serials published there have on average a much higher Impact Factor than those based elsewhere (Björk, Solomon, 2012: 6). In well developed countries openness is slowly becoming a part of the mainstream approach to academic publishing and almost every big publisher is dealing with open access, although there are a lot of questions and problems around it. Meanwhile, research has shown, that the real leaders of openness are outside the global publishing center, and probably at this moment, the periphery of the academic world benefits most from open access ..."