Global patterns in the publishing of academic knowledge: Global North,global South

Introduction

The production of scientific and other forms of academic knowledge has become a topic of some interest to 21st-century social science, with a variety of terms developed to describe the growing significance of knowledge in the shaping of social life and the economy. Terms such as the ‘information society’, the ‘knowledge industry’ (Machlup, 1962), the ‘knowledge economy’ and the ‘knowledge worker’ (Drucker, 1966) – popularised by management theorists in an effort to encourage more efficient production processes – have also been developed in sociology, though in this case with a more critical focus on the role of knowledge in social change. For instance, the notion of a ‘knowledge society’, ‘information society’ (Fukuyama, 1992) or ‘network society’ (Castells, 1996) evoke previous debates by Bell (1973) and Toffler (1970) about the changing role of knowledge in society and the transition from an industrial to a knowledge-based society. The sociological focus here is the structure of society, a concern with the way knowledge has become central to a new form of society and how this has wrought fundamental change in practices and the nature of inequality. For Drahos and Braithwaite (2002: 39, 52), the new role of knowledge in society and the economy has become evident, for knowledge has become not merely a means to power and market advantage but the very ‘source of profits in modern global markets’.

A rather different approach to understanding the potential for difference and inequality in the production of knowledge across the globe derives from a long tradition of colonial and postcolonial writings, including those of Gandhi (1996) as early as 1909, and many years later, Said (1978). In early iterations, colonial writings were political documents, part of various social movements for independence from colonial rule, and this activism is still evident in the genre. In its current form, postcolonial theory condemns conventional theories of development and modernisation for having encouraged generations of scholars to ignore the salience of imperialism, racism, gender and colonialism in the development of the sciences, in the formation of disciplines, the growth of institutions and more generally in the constitution of modernity (e.g. Alatas, 2003, 2006; Baber, 2003; Chakrabarty, 2000; Connell, 2007; Harding, 2008; Hountondji, 1990). It is a literature which continues to challenge traditional theories of the sciences, its histories, and its explanations of the processes of knowledge production. Indeed, it inserts diversity and multiplicity into conventional histories, and brings forth the voices of those who fail to appear in the disciplinary canons and official histories (e.g. Alatas, 2006; Bhambra, 2014).

Postcolonial theory, and what is rapidly coming to be known as ‘Southern theory’ (Connell, 2007), offer the opportunity for a very different sociology of knowledge to be developed. While the ‘old’ sociology of knowledge grew from the work of Mannheim (1985 [1929]) and Scheler (1992 [1926]) and explored the contents of knowledge and the social location of the knowledge-holders, the ‘new’ sociology of knowledge seeks to investigate the practices of knowing and the way in which different forms of social organisation make ‘whole orderings of knowledge possible’ (Swidler and Arditi, 1994: 306). Yet there is a need to move beyond the limitations of both the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ sociologies of knowledge. Knowledge is not just a product of individual knowledge-makers, nor shaped only by the organisations in which it is embedded. The broader field of knowledge production needs to be a focus, the way it has coherence across multiple sites (Star, 1989: 116), and yet displays systematic boundaries and mechanisms of exclusion across and between countries and regions of the world.

Certainly, national differences in knowledge-making have been noted between the French, British and Americans, and these have been traced to differences in the core institutions that support intellectual life (Swidler and Arditi, 1994: 316). Such reflections bring to the fore further – and broader – questions about the processes that produce and sustain differences between nations and regions, particularly given the extent of migration among intellectuals and the apparent building of a transnational academic community. One approach to answering such questions is to couple the sociology of knowledge with elements of postcolonial and Southern theories. This may offer a foundation for investigating the historical formation of the ‘world social science powers’ – the knowledge produced within the countries of the core or metropole – and the international division of knowledge labour which provides for contrasting roles for scholars in the North and South.

Various theorists speak of this division. Baber (2003), for instance, claims scholarship in the global South conventionally names the site of its research and generally offers the product as ‘merely’ a case study, while Northern scholarship rarely makes reference to the geographical location of the research, assuming the studies to have universal relevance and a capacity to produce generic claims about the processes of class, status and power in all societies (Baber, 2003: 618). Bourdieu’s (1984) Homo Academicus, a study of French educational institutions, is a perfect example of this presumption of universalism, which perpetuates ‘an unstated but real global division of intellectual labour’ (Baber, 2003: 621). Alatas’s name for the process behind such practices is ‘academic dependence’, and he takes the claim further, arguing that theoretical and methodological innovations are considered legitimate tasks for scholars in the First World, while the designated role for those of the Third World is empirical data collection (Alatas, 2003: 607). Kreimer and Zabala (2008) demonstrate the operation of this division of labour, where collaborations between North and South provide Northern scholars with publishable knowledge, while Southern scholars take part only as ‘sub-contractors’, producing knowledge which cannot be made relevant in the solving of local problems. Citation analysis adds quantitative evidence of the unequal bifurcation of world knowledge production, showing scholars in the global North to be self-citing and inward-looking, while in the periphery, citations are primarily directed toward the publications of the core countries (Collyer, 2014; Danell, 2013). These practices lead to significant inequality in citation counts between global North and South, and show that despite the existence of knowledge production in the global South, Southern scholarship is rarely cited by either Northern or Southern scholars. This is an important example of the pattern that Hountondji (2002) terms ‘extroversion’, where scholars in the global South are oriented toward sources of authority from a society not one’s own.

Despite substantial evidence of the dominance of the global North in the production of knowledge, questions remain about the way knowledge ‘travels’ or is transferred around the globe. Conventional accounts of world history and of scientific production are Euro-centric, positing the non-West as a passive recipient of a set of European developments which have unfolded over time and spread in one direction, that is, from the core toward the peripheral countries (Chakrabarty, 2000). An alternative is to theorise scientific and other academic forms of knowledge as having been produced within a context of colonialism and imperialism, and negotiated into existence between the struggles of the colonisers and the colonised. This account provides science with a history of co-production, ‘not only of Empire but of imperial science as well’ (Raj, 2006: 7). A new perspective is needed to describe the direction of flow of this ‘co-produced’ knowledge. To what extent, one must ask, does knowledge production occur in the periphery? And are all flows of academic knowledge between the global North and South?

There have been some conceptual developments that may assist in answering such questions. For example, Heilbron’s (2014) analysis of the rise of a transnational regional structure across Europe suggests that the core–periphery structure has become duopolistic, with Europe in a position roughly equal to the United States in terms of articles and citations. This notion of a transnational or transregional structure of knowledge-making suggests the possibility that rather than a single structure of knowledge production, there may exist multiple ‘circuits’ of knowledge production. Keim has used the term in a similar fashion when arguing for knowledge as something that is in incessant circulation, torn from its originating geographical and social context, and in the process continually transformed and reconfigured (Keim, 2014: 88–9). Questions immediately come to mind about such circuits and their genesis. Beigel (2014) raises the possibility of a Latin American circuit of academic recognition and knowledge production, though her focus is Argentinian science rather than the workings of the circuit itself. For Heilbron, international organisations have been important in the development of science in the periphery, though he admits information about transnational, transregional institutions (such as the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa [CODESRIA]), around which such structures might grow, is as yet sparse and in need of historical analysis (Heilbron, 2014: 693).

The notion of multiple circuits of knowledge production in operation is thus an emergent one, in need of both theoretical and empirical elaboration. An important first step is to gain a clearer understanding of the varying knowledge practices between North and South. There have been empirical studies showing the differing extents to which countries have strategically invested in research, and indicating that national wealth is only one of several determinants in this policy arena (e.g. Mouton and Waast, 2009). Far less interest has been shown in investigating the differential investments in the dissemination of this research, and the uneven global terrain upon which publication takes place. And yet publication is a crucial component of research effort, and critical to the institutionalisation and sustenance of disciplines. It is, for example, central to academic promotion and placement in the academic job market (Headworth and Freese, 2016). Publication also assists with the formation and maintenance of academic communities of knowledge workers, even where members of these communities may never physically meet. It bridges members across geographical space as well as time, linking scholars inter-generationally, and it coordinates networks of scholars, distributing ideas widely and making communication practices more effective. A focus on publication may therefore provide much needed insight into the ‘flows’ of knowledge between North and South, and the question of whether there are other flows or circuits in the system of knowledge production.

This article investigates the world of academic publishing with these concerns in mind. Focusing on recent and significant changes in the publishing industry, it reveals not just the centrality of publishing to academic knowledge production, but many of the ways academic publishing is implicated in the maintenance of North–South inequalities. The proposition is that publication is a process that helps to structure knowledge production, both enabling and constraining specific knowledge practices. The study of publication practices, and the structures that are formed over time through these practices, are shown to be indicative of – and assist to explain – many of the differential opportunities and obstructions faced by knowledge workers in various parts of the globe.

It is to the task of investigating academic publishing as an essential component of knowledge production – and to revealing the mechanisms of inequality that are sustained and re-worked through publishing – to which we turn in subsequent sections of this article. First however, it is important to outline the methods of the empirical study from which this discussion is drawn.

Methodology of the study of the global politics of knowledge

This study of global publishing is part of a larger, international study into the global politics of knowledge conducted across three countries – South Africa, Brazil and Australia – all of the global South. Both qualitative and quantitative methods have been used to investigate ‘knowledge-making’ in these countries, and to construct a map of global knowledge production. To date, over 100 in-depth, qualitative interviews have been conducted with ‘knowledge workers’, that is, publishers, editors, research managers, research scholars and academics. This article is based on an analysis of 45 interviews from participants working in five countries, composed as follows: 15 publishers and 17 editors (23 of whom were also participants in our life-history study of knowledge workers), and 13 other knowledge workers, selected for their significant publication output and experience in peer review. In the life-history study, researchers were interviewed in three domains of knowledge, climate change, gender and sexuality and HIV/AIDs, in each of three countries of the global South: Australia, Brazil and South Africa. The domains were chosen because they were historically new interdisciplinary fields, of current public concern, and areas in which the global South has played at least some role. Our analysis of the publication of knowledge is thus linked with a study of the production of knowledge in the same fields and countries. Interviews with publishers and editors in the United States and Hong Kong were added to extend the data-gathering about publication circuits into the global North and the rapidly developing Asian context. In all countries, both commercial and university publishing houses were targeted. Pseudonyms have been provided in this article to protect the identity of participants. ¹

Academic publishing and the dominance of the global North

Our investigation of academic publishing focuses on several of the more salient mechanisms through which the inequalities of knowledge production between the North and South are maintained. These processes include market concentration, commodification, monopolisation, extraversion, intraversion, internationalisation and standardisation.

The first of these, market concentration, is a fundamental and very recent development within the publishing industry. Indeed the industry has been transformed over the recent two decades, with the market becoming both more competitive and, contrary to orthodox economic theory, concentrated. A glance at the current global market shows a highly skewed pattern, with a handful of very large publishing companies in the lead, followed by a ‘long tail’ of medium and small publishers. In 2015, the top 10 world publishers combined accounted for 54% of all revenue generated by the 57 companies on the list, up from 53% in 2013 (Publishers Weekly, 2015). The headquarters of the major publishers, the major scholarly journals and the major scientific societies and associations are largely found in the global North. For example, in 2015, Pearson, a UK-based media group, maintained its position at the top of the annual ranking of book publishers with revenues of US$7072 million. The next four in the ranking are also multinational but with headquarters in the global North: Thomson Reuters is in second position with US$5760 million, followed by Reed Elsevier with US$5362, Wolters Kluwer with US$4455 million and Penguin Random House with US$4046 million (Publishers Weekly, 2015). Overall, 70% (40/57) of the top 57 companies are headquartered in the core countries (the countries of North America and Europe and the UK), with a significant difference in revenues between the top half dozen and the rest of the list.

In this new market, two associated processes – commodification and monopolisation – are having a significant impact on academic knowledge production. Commodification is most evident in the change of ownership and/or management of academic journals and the publication of research monographs. Particularly dramatic in some of the countries of the periphery, such as Australia, Chile and Hong Kong (but less so in countries with continuing and strong state ownership/control over universities, such as in Brazil), long-established practices of publishing from within academic departments are in decline. On the one hand, many of the university presses have succumbed to reductions in government support and university funding, and have downsized or been sold outright to commercial interests. On the other hand, commercial publishers have increasingly replaced the role of the academic as a publisher of journals. Although many academics continue to edit journals, and professional societies continue to sponsor journals, journals are increasingly likely to be managed or owned outright by commercial operators, and publication has become a commercial (and profit-oriented) function rather than funded from university budgets and subscriptions from individual academics, professional societies and libraries.

The transfer of journal and monograph publication into commercial hands along with the concentration of ownership among companies operating primarily out of the global North has significant implications for academic knowledge production. One of these is the resultant standardisation of journals – and their content – across otherwise disparate locations. In our study, journal editors were asked about publication practices, and discussions often pointed to the imposition of an American (and sometimes European) model of publishing production on the global South. Examining the changing role of the book review in the global South offers a fine example of this. Although practices vary between disciplines, American social scientists generally place a high value on the research monograph, and measures of a ‘successful’ book include the awarding of prizes for books (often bestowed by professional societies), and the placement of book reviews in prestigious journals. Thus in the United States, a section in an academic journal on book reviews is an essential marker of a ‘quality’ journal, as is the presence of an independent book editor or editorial team. In contrast, Brazilian academics have not developed a culture of book prizes or book reviews, and many of the journals do not have either an independent book review editor or a distinct section for book reviews. One editor, who had spent a number of years working in the USA, discussed her efforts to change current practices:

I created a section [in the journal] for books reviews, it is not part of the Brazilian tradition, it is not common [practice] … One of the reasons for that is that the programs receive money according to a ranking given by the federal government, and … book reviews count for nothing [in this ranking system] … [also] part of the culture is that if you are writing something about someone in public you don’t criticise their weaker points, which is the most terrible thing you can do for book reviews … I would say that we can speak behind your back and say that your book is terrible to colleagues, but you are never going to put this in written [sic], even the mildest, and I mean mildest criticism can be really badly received … it is not so much in the articles, in the articles they can be very tough both for international and for local, we can have fierce fights. But book reviews, the tradition is to have very very laudatory book reviews. (Alessandra, editor, Brazil)

The process of commodification of knowledge production can also be seen to have an impact on academic practices. In this process, long-established academic practices of locating suitable materials for research and teaching are overturned. Traditional practices of searching through books of abstracts (often produced by professional societies or as works of scholarship), or relying on a list of favoured journals (developed through personal experience, advice from mentors or from other trusted sources) are replaced with commercial indexing products such as the Thomson Reuters International Science Index (ISI), Scopus or Medline. The articles indexed in these products are from journals primarily edited from the North: often high profile journals, but mixed with journals of lesser quality also owned by the major publishing companies (part of the publisher’s ‘stable’ of journals). The powerful search engines of these products render them easy to use, and in combination with the increasing time pressure on academics, have meant that the indexes now serve as the primary – and legitimate – means by which academics come to locate materials. Papers not found in the indexes are assumed to be of lesser quality, and largely overlooked. This process particularly marginalises papers produced by scholars working in the global South, whose journals are largely excluded from the Northern indexes.

The monopolisation of academic publishing by corporate publishing houses is another process reshaping academic knowledge production. The publishing houses are now so large, Tom, an Australian publisher, tells us that they have ‘critical mass in some areas … and can make decisions about price … that completely wipe out the budgets of libraries’. Monopolisation allows subscription rates to be inflated, making costs particularly prohibitive for those in the South. In this context the high price of subscriptions to a package of journals also operates as a de facto signal for quality, thus reinforcing the greater prestige of Northern products.

Monopolisation also means that publishing houses operating outside the global North face specific problems in the distribution and sale of their products. The publishers in this study offered various examples of how the international trade in books and other knowledge products favour the global North. They suggested trade routes had long been established between the core and periphery, and these tend to be unidirectional, ensuring the core is able to export its products. While it is possible to create new trade routes from, or between Southern countries, it is difficult and expensive to do so:

… it’s something that’s still not understood by the publishing industry; they look at me baffled when I say we can trade in Britain and the US but we can’t trade with other African countries. It’s a mixture of isolation and a consequence of the arbitrary boundaries of South African countries; plus tariff barriers, duty levies, currency difficulties. You might get something across a border but you might not be able to get the money back. (Mary, publisher/editor, South Africa)

Similar problems were discussed by the Australian publishers in this study, suggesting the trade routes for academic books that had been established between the United States and Australia in the 1960s and 1970s still have an impact today, making it easier to trade with the US than it is for Australia to trade with other countries, including Britain. These trade relations were created when the Australian university sector was rapidly expanding and the USA provided it with both academics and books (Britain was also rebuilding its university sector at the time and was not in a position to be a large supplier of either):

The UK market is an export market and not very oriented to imports. Everybody, including American publishers, find it very difficult to distribute into the UK market. There are greater limitations to that. The US market is strangely more open in some ways [for advanced books at least] while at the same time being wildly parochial. (Helen, publisher, Australia)

The direction of flow in these trade routes is primarily North to South, with few Southern products becoming available worldwide. The large multinational publishing houses, according to Tom (publisher, Australia), see Australia as a ‘regional outpost for distribution of their titles … A lot of the challenge [is] really to convince them that local content [is] important and relevance to the local readership [is] important’.

Internationalisation is another of the processes through which global domination is sustained. Like standardisation, internationalisation would have little impact if the market was not monopolised by the companies of the global North, nor if academic knowledge had not been commodified. ‘Internationalisation’ is currently a key discourse of governments in peripheral countries, assumed to be a solution for underdevelopment or marginalisation from the major economies. In practice, in many countries of the global South, internationalisation of the research sector is assumed to have occurred if there is a widespread adoption of English as the language of publication. In Brazil, where many academic journals continue to be produced in university departments or research centres, rather than under the auspices of professional societies (as they are in the United States), or by commercial publishers (as they are increasingly in Australia), Brazilian state research agencies provide funding for a five-year programme of ‘internationalisation’. There are several aspects to this programme, but it includes funds to assist with the cost of translation, on condition that a percentage of articles in each journal will be published in English. Editors and publishers argue that such requirements are problematic for several reasons, not least because government only partially covers the cost of the very expensive process of translation, but also, as Bertrand explains, it privileges English-language journals that are oriented toward issues relevant to the global North, rather than journals offering articles in Portuguese and directed at the debates of concern to the national and regional academic communities. As he states, ‘we also have important questions in Brazil and important questions in Latin America to be discussed collectively’ (Bertrand, publisher and editor, Brazil). He suggests the solution is to publish in English and Portuguese so that ‘both public audiences’ can be included, but there is less financial support for Portuguese-language journals and pressure to publish only in English.

In Hong Kong, internationalisation is also a major discourse within the universities. For academics this requires publishing in the ‘top’ journals (which means American journals that are indexed in the Science Citation Index [SCI] or the Social Science Citation Index [SSCI]), and ‘top’ presses (which means the major American university presses); attending American conferences (such as the American Political Science Association) or perhaps European conferences; and the adoption of the American system of academic tenure (with its six-year probation period for tenure-track positions). For the editors of journals, internationalisation means publishing in English and selecting manuscripts oriented to debates of interest to the academic communities of Europe and the USA. Chinese-language publications are not as highly valued, and there is pressure on editors to modify their journals in order to obtain SCI or SSCI ranking – which means the timely publication of issues, an international editorial board and articles of international relevance. One of the participants in this study, who edits two journals, one English language and one Chinese, sees the latter as important, ‘because I believe in making a contribution to the local community. It is unfortunate that the university doesn’t pay much attention to it but I still believe that this is important’ (Phillip, editor, Hong Kong). Given its low status within university management, Phillip is cautious about recommending the Chinese journal as an outlet for the work of his students or junior colleagues.

The final two processes under discussion in this article are extraversion and intraversion. Extraversion (or extroversion, as conceived by Hountondji in 2002), refers to the processes through which scholars of the South tend to be oriented toward Northern scholarship, finding theoretical frameworks and methodologies for their local studies, and addressing issues of interest to the North. There was much evidence of extraversion in our larger study (as reported in Connell et al., forthcoming). In the publishing study, in contrast, given the inclusion of participants from the global North as well as South, evidence is also available of intraversion, a process whereby scholars are inwardly focused, suspicious of knowledge from sources external to their own country. Our participants (publishers, editors and academics), having volunteered to discuss such issues with the researchers, were all aware of the global North’s domination (even those working in the global North itself), and also of the prevalence of intraversion. One participant said, ‘the funny thing about America … is that it is very parochial, it is a very powerful but a very parochial market’ (Andrew, editor, USA). Participants spoke of the way barriers exist not just between North and South, but within the global North. ‘The Americans take no notice virtually of all British publishers apart from Oxford University Press and Cambridge … I don’t think they would have heard of University of Melbourne Press which Australians would regard as prestigious’ (Andrew, editor, USA). When asked how academics might evaluate another academic’s work if it were published in a journal that is not American, Miles, an editor in the United States, explained:

We haven’t figured that out at all yet as a discipline. So, right now it would give you, it would be a very bad move to have a paper that was good enough to appear in say the European Sociological Review … and not, publish in an American journal, because people just don’t have the same … you know we’re America, we’re becoming, sociology is becoming palpably more global in my time in the discipline, but it’s not at that point yet where we know how to evaluate European journals.

Participants were asked to explain the lack of interest in papers and books from countries of the global South. One said that ‘we very rarely get serious papers from developing countries … it is just a different kind of world’ (William, editor, USA). When pressed further, William said there are very different styles of work in different countries, much of which is ‘not to our taste’. He suggested that Americans have expectations about how much theory should be in an article, and particular standards of quantitative analysis, and even papers from other highly developed countries are usually not accepted:

… a great French sociology article does not look like a great American sociology article [and] the papers that are coming out of [the Netherlands] … these are like we are back in the 1960s … a genre of sociology that hasn’t been characteristic in America for years … very stylistically different … and British sociology is a totally different kind of way of writing an article. So it is actually very hard to think about creating an international language for this. (William, editor, USA)

Several participants from the global North spoke of the need to ‘internationalise’ (which in this context means to look for research taking place outside North America), but noted that this need was only recognised by ‘activists’, not by the elite of the discipline, and was yet to have an impact on the publishing sphere (Miles, editor, USA). Editors and academics admitted to a level of ‘cronyism’ within the journals, of systems of ‘insiders and outsiders’ that make it difficult for an individual to publish in journals where they are unknown:

That is a legacy of the parochialness of American sociology … American sociology overwhelmingly is about American society, it is an inward looking place … when you invite somebody onto your editorial board you would like to know a little bit about what kind of a judge they are … because that is what you do on an editorial board, you just do a lot of judging, you do evaluation work. And so it is good to be able to know if somebody [has] good taste because you want people with good taste on your editorial board. And … it is much easier to think of someone with good taste that also happens to be at another American sociology department than it is to think of someone with good taste who is somewhere like Britain, or Australia, or Canada … So there is a bit of a struggle to find appropriate … senior people with good taste who are going to judge work on its merits and not try to just take care of their friends, and you know they are going to do a good job. It is harder to find those people because you can’t just sort of look at a sociology department in a European university and say oh let’s just pick one of these people at random and invite them to join our board … you are not familiar with their work and you don’t know … what their standard of evaluation is. (Edward, editor, USA)

For workers in the global South, intraversion translates into a barrier for publication in the international journals:

If you look at these papers published in American Journal of Sociology [for example] … you know that … They ask for a certain approach, they encourage you to follow this kind of certain approach … Follow that norm … And then if you are not, if you are not there you are left out, no matter how good you are. (Rosie, academic, Hong Kong)

Academic publishing and transregional circuits

Amid the evidence for a publishing industry dominated by the global North, and in parallel with an academic culture oriented toward the global North and having the authority to define the standards and models of ‘good’ science, participants also offered evidence of the existence of alternative circuits of publication that have developed in response to the inequalities of global publishing. These alternative circuits disseminate knowledge from the developing countries, and, in the process, help to produce a sense of shared community across regions or cross-nationally, encouraging participants to adopt new identities such as ‘pan-African’ or ‘Latin American’.

One of these alternative circuits of publishing is based upon the sharing of Latin American languages, primarily Spanish. While publishers the world over head to the annual Frankfurt Book Fair to sell their wares and buy rights to books or opportunities for co-publishing, some also make their way to the Guadalajara International Book Fair. This book fair was founded by the University of Guadalajara in Mexico and has been operating since 1987. It is the largest market in the world for Spanish-language publications, attracting about 2000 publishers from 40 countries each year. For Olivier (publisher/editor, Brazil), the Guadalajara book fair is much more important than Frankfurt, for the latter has a focus on English texts and makes it difficult for Brazilians to sell their own books. The Guadalajara book fair greatly extends the reach of Olivier’s books beyond Brazil, Portugal and Spain, which are his main countries of distribution. Karen, a university press publisher in the global North, also spoke of the importance of the Guadalajara book fair for building her list profile. Although translations are not a large part of the list – for they are ‘very expensive undertakings’ – they are an important part of it, and she ‘occasionally’ finds works in Spanish or other European languages that can be translated into English once the rights are bought from the foreign press (Karen, publisher, USA).

A second element critical to this Latin American circuit of knowledge is an alternative indexing system called the Latin American Index of Scientific Publications Serials (Latindex). Created in 1997, Latindex was the brain child of researchers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and has been a cooperative effort between the countries of Latin America (including Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico and Argentina), the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal. Latindex provides an extensive database of scientific journals, technical and professional research publications. Its mission is to increase the visibility of publications from the regions, providing an extensive list of journals with electronic links to the full texts of many of the journal articles themselves. Like the Web of Science, there are restrictions on the registration of journals as a strategy to ensure the quality of the collection. In this case journals must have been existence for at least one year, at least two-thirds of the editorial body must be external to the publishing institution, and, to limit endogeny, at least 50% of the papers must be from external authors.

A third element in this fundamentally ‘South–South’ knowledge circuit has been the development of the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) in Brazil, which has recently been extended to developing countries:

SciELO is the equivalent of JSTOR ok, so it is a very important database for articles, for the full articles, it is … different from JSTOR, it is free, it is Open Access … it is very prestigious for a journal to be there, we have just recently been approved, they are supported by the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology, and it is fantastic. I mean everybody can access it from any place. (Alessandra, editor, Brazil)

Currently containing journals from about 15 countries, SciELO offers editors the free use of Scholar One for handling their manuscript submission and review processes. Scholar One has become a very common software for manuscript management worldwide, though it is not without its problems. As Alessandra informs us, ‘all the email templates are in English … the instructions to the authors are in English, we have to translate everything’. In addition, there are language requirements for SciELO journals. Depending on the area or discipline, 30–40% of the articles must be published in English (Olivier, publisher/editor, Brazil).

In addition to the Latin American circuit of knowledge, another circuit identified in this study is focused on Africa and its many countries. There has been limited independent scholarly publishing in Africa, given that much of its research output has been the result of foreign aid and foreign agencies with their own agendas and publication and distribution facilities (Mkandawire, 2005: 35). Moreover, African scholarship is not well served in the dominant publication circuit. For instance, only one African social science journal appears in the SSCI, in FRANCIS and in Sociological Abstracts, and this single entry does not include one of the two most prestigious journals on the continent: Africa Development and African Sociological Review (Keim, 2008: 30). There are over 2000 languages spoken in Africa, several official languages and languages of publication, noticeably French, Portuguese, Arabic and English. The pressure to publish in international journals and the relatively undeveloped nature of a research culture in Africa have meant many African academics have fallen victim to the rise of ‘predatory’ journals, where high costs are charged for publication in ‘fake’ journals that have little or no editorial review and on websites that are generally inaccessible and poorly managed (for an analysis of this problem for Nigeria, see Omobowale et al., 2014).

The South African government, via the Department of Education, pays its universities a substantial subsidy for each journal article published in journals indexed in the SSCI or SCI, indicating the dominance of this international mechanism of evaluation. Publication in open access journals is not similarly rewarded, nor is the South African state supportive of the efforts of its university presses to distribute African research or make it more widely accessible (Gray, 2009: 15). This system encourages scholars to address issues of ‘international’ rather than local relevance, and seek publication in international rather than locally accredited publications. It also acts as a brake on the formation of new journals addressing local issues (Gray, 2009: 16). Acknowledgement of the disincentives of the system led the South African government to fund the building of a national platform for indexing high quality, open access African journals as well as aim toward the provision of financial support for local journals. Given the success of the Brazilian SciELO, the same model was adopted for South Africa. SciELO SA was initially hosted on the Brazilian site, and has been independent since 2012. About 40 journals are currently listed.

Another approach to building a transnational circuit of knowledge across Africa has been developed by the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). Established in 1973 in Senegal by researchers, academics and African intellectuals (http://codesria.org), the Council focuses on the dissemination of the humanities and social sciences. Both African and international bodies provide funding for CODESRIA, including philanthropic agencies such as the Ford Foundation, foreign governments (Denmark and the Netherlands) and the United Nations. CODESRIA is one of the largest publishers in Africa, with at least 12 peer-reviewed journals in its stable (including Africa Development and African Sociological Review), and producing about 40 research monographs annually.

The pan-African networks supported by CODESRIA are important as a counter-measure in a continent that has been the focus of considerable international research and international funding agencies. Foreign research funding, while welcomed by many in the small research community, has been problematic for African development. The collaboration between foreign and local researchers has been highly asymmetric, with foreign partners setting the agendas and benefiting from the outcomes. One of our participants, working in the domain of HIV/AIDS, states that she has ‘always been struck in the HIV field at how un-South African, if you like, the research agenda has been’ (Jennifer, academic, editor, South Africa). In the AIDS domain it is driven by the international community, the American National Institutes of Health, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (in part at least, because many of these programmes require fund holders to have partners in the global South). This means it is science focused rather than multidisciplinary, the goals are ‘to win the Nobel Prize, not fix AIDS’, and success is measured differently. If it were a ‘Southern view’, Jennifer says, it would mean ‘we are successful because we have extended treatment to so many’. Instead, success is measured in citations in the SCI. In Africa, as occurs in many other countries of the global South, researchers are forced to choose between publishing in international or African-regional journals. This leads to a situation where, as Hanafi (2011) states, the elites in the research world either ‘publish globally and perish locally’ or ‘publish locally and perish globally’.

In an effort to address some of these problems, United Nations resources have been used to create networks across ‘Southern’ countries and between the ‘South’ and the ‘North’. Within the climate change domain of knowledge production, an organisation called SouthSouthNorth (SSN) was created in 1999, as a partnership between institutions in the Netherlands, France, Brazil, South Africa, Bangladesh and Indonesia. More recently, as part of a consortium, SSN has built the Climate and Development Knowledge Network with 60 million British pounds in funding. This led to the formation of the collaborative Mitigation Action Plans and Scenarios (MAPS) Programme based at the University of Cape Town with the aim of building indigenous research capacity and an evidence base for the transition to low-carbon societies. Participants in our study discussed the ways in which these networks were changing the previous North/South division in climate change research:

Historically, research was mainly driven by developed countries, but I think that is changing very much. That has been one of my bigger surprises when I moved from [Europe] to here … I always had that feeling that we were doing much breakthrough work up there, and it’s not the case at all. I think that still the research capacity in Europe is much higher – there’s more money, there are more people etc. – but especially in the public sector, there’s much more happening in developing countries than in developed countries … It’s being seen as part of the core business of ensuring development in developing countries … for me, coming here and working with the Brazilians, the Chileans, the Colombians, the Bolivians, the South Africans has been kind of an eye-opener. (Amanda, climate change research, South Africa)

The growth of knowledge production in South Africa in the field of climate change and environmental science has attracted attention from local publishers. Charlotte tells us that this is becoming a successful new area for her press. ‘I try and make sure we have more African, broader African case studies or writers contributing to the [environment] books, or that the topic covers other parts of Africa. And that now is what makes us different’ (Charlotte, university press, South Africa). This example suggests that knowledge production practices can be modified to the benefit of workers in the global South, particularly where universities support, and make good use of their university presses to showcase the work of their researchers rather than demand the presses operate as profit-seeking commercial operations and return a profit.

Concluding reflections

This article has proposed publishing as a process fundamental to academic knowledge production in its capacity to assist with the formation and maintenance of knowledge networks and disciplines, yet equally implicated in the isolation or marginalisation of specific social groups and the inhibition of alternatives to mainstream knowledge production. As such, publishing is of central importance to the creation and sustenance of global inequalities in academic knowledge production. Some of the mechanisms associated with publishing, and which sustain these global inequalities, have been revealed through the empirical study reported herein. These mechanisms allow knowledges produced in the global South to be systematically marginalised, dismissed, under-valued or simply not made accessible to other researchers.

One response to this marginalisation has been the development of alternative, transregional or transnational circuits of publication, involving for instance the Guadalajara International Book Fair, and alternative indexes such as SciELO and Latindex. These developments have the potential to be both divisive and constructive in the global knowledge system. Challenges to established, dominant social orders (as we find with these responses to Northern hegemony in the knowledge system) tend to produce tensions and debates about ‘good’ science (Jasanoff, 2004: 7). As we have seen in this study, these debates about ‘good’ science tend to do little to alter inequalities, for they seem to provide space for participants to unproblematically view knowledge from the South as ‘unknown’, ‘untested’ or of questionable relevance or validity. Although this study does not provide an evaluation of the alternative circuits mentioned here, there are examples of the negative effects of the establishment of alternative organisational bodies in the literature. For instance, in the case of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and environmental politics, the creation of the International Negotiating Committee of the UN General Assembly to address the political dimensions of climate change, as distinct and independent from the scientific working group, brought a degree of stability to the processes of research and evaluation. At the same time, it embedded the prevailing notion that science and politics are separate spheres of social activity (Miller, 2004: 60). The boundaries drawn between political action and science enabled the US to officially accept IPCC science, but exit from the political strategies laid down as essential for environmental sustainability (Miller, 2004: 63). At the global level, the boundaries have led to the exclusion of developing country views from the framing of the climate change problem (Miller, 2004: 62).

A similar probability emerges with regard to the formation of distinct publication circuits. The embedding of boundaries of difference between ‘Southern’ and ‘Northern’ knowledge and their respective publications offers the chance for the South to raise the visibility of its work, to develop regional or transnational critiques, methodologies and theoretical frameworks, and to make claims about the strengths and validity of ‘Southern’ products and perspectives. Equally however, the prospect is raised that the creation of boundaries and difference in the global knowledge system will provide legitimacy to existing practices of intraversion among Northern scholars, and thereby increase the level of ignorance about the knowledge produced in the global South. Neither outcome is certain, and further analysis and social action are essential if future academic knowledge production is to benefit from the possibilities of diversity and difference.