Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access draws together various chapters on the current and future state of scholarly communication, especially in relation to open access and open scholarship movements. Eve and Gray have incorporated perspectives from around the globe in this collection, with an emphasis on critical approaches to open scholarship endeavours and activities. For instance, Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou argues that open access can be quite detrimental in Africa, where the pressure to publish in English in a foreign OA journal reinscribes a colonial approach to knowledge production in its waylaying of local and / or Indigenous knowledge creation and sharing. Denise Albornoz, Angela Okune, and Leslie Chan reinforce this point when they argue that “open systems may potentially replicate the very values and power imbalances that the movement initially sought to change” (65), in particular regarding the replication of  epistemic injustice: “the devaluing of someone’s knowledge or capacity as a knower” (65). Furthermore, Charlotte Roh, Harrison W. Inefuku, and Emily Drabinski suggest:

“Scholarly communications is a series of material practices that could be constructed otherwise—rooted in equity and justice rather that [sic] colonization and dominance” (49).

Throughout the collection, the common message seems to be that open scholarship is largely a positive movement, but that there are numerous facets that require careful consideration in order to not replicate existing inequities in academia.

 

Works cited

Albornoz, Denise, Angela Okune, and Leslie Chan. 2020. “Can Open Scholarly Practices Redress Epistemic Injustice?” In Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access, edited by Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray, 65-79. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Eve, Martin Paul, and Jonathan Gray, eds. 2020. Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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

Roh, Charlotte, Harrison W. Inefuku, and Emily Drabinski. 2020. “Scholarly Communications and Social Justice.” In Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access, edited by Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray, 41-52. Cambridge: MIT Press.