The future of academic publishing in the global south

The Future of Academic Publishing in the Global South

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Table of Contents

Introduction

The academic publishing world has long been dominated by the Global North: think of those large, commercial, and often wildly profitable publishing houses headquartered in North America and Western Europe. This dominance has created a landscape where the knowledge, research questions, and institutional contexts of the Global South—a term generally encompassing countries in Africa, Latin America, and developing parts of Asia—are frequently marginalized, underrepresented, and financially constrained. 

For decades, researchers in these regions have faced a publishing Catch-22: publish in prestigious North-centric journals to gain career recognition, or publish locally to address community-relevant issues but risk less international visibility. The former often involves exorbitant Article Processing Charges (APCs) or subscription costs that are simply unsustainable for underfunded institutions.

Today, this paradigm is finally beginning to shift, albeit slowly and with significant growing pains. The future of academic publishing in the Global South isn’t just about catching up to the North’s publication volume; it’s about decolonizing knowledge, building robust, equitable, and locally-driven infrastructure, and fundamentally changing the metrics of research success. 

This write-up dissects the complex challenges currently facing Southern scholars and publishers, explores the burgeoning counter-models like Diamond Open Access, and projects the technologies and policy changes that will define a fairer, more representative scholarly future. The conversation is moving beyond simply demanding a seat at the table; it’s about building a whole new dining room where the menu is decided locally.

The Imbalance of the Current Scholarly Ecosystem

The current state of academic publishing is a structural problem, built on a foundation of historical wealth and the commercialization of publicly funded research. It’s a system where the Global North dictates prestige, and the Global South often pays the price in both financial and intellectual capital. The disproportionate investment in research and development is stark. For example, the average national expenditure on R&D in developing regions is typically between 0.5% and 1% of GDP, while in developed regions such as North America and Europe, the average R&D expenditure often ranges from 2% to over 3% of GDP. This massive resource disparity immediately sets the stage for a lopsided publishing output.

This financial and infrastructural asymmetry is immediately visible in publication metrics. While countries like China and India have significantly ramped up their research output, an analysis shows that, excluding these two giants, leading countries in the Global North such as the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom each produce well over 90,000 scientific and technical journal articles annually, whereas most countries in the Global South typically publish fewer than 10,000 articles per year, with only a small number surpassing that threshold. 

Even more telling is that less than 2% of the Global South’s output made it into the top 1% most-cited articles globally. The lack of visibility and perceived impact isn’t necessarily a reflection of lower-quality research; it’s a testament to the geographical bias and entrenched reward systems that privilege Western-centric journals, languages, and research topics.

Structural Challenges for Southern Scholars

The path to publication is littered with unique obstacles for researchers from the Global South, challenges that extend far beyond simply having an interesting research question. These are systemic issues rooted in infrastructure, language, and the fundamental mechanics of the North-centric publishing pipeline. The difficulties begin with asymmetric access to knowledge. While the open access movement is helping, many peer-reviewed articles remain behind paywalls, leaving Southern universities with limited access to the very research they are expected to build upon. This lack of access can be so severe that some academics refer to the situation in parts of Africa as an “information famine.”

Another significant hurdle is the prohibitive cost of publishing in high-impact, international Gold Open Access (OA) journals. The shift from a “pay-to-read” subscription model to a “pay-to-publish” model with hefty Article Processing Charges (APCs) simply transfers the financial burden. With APCs often ranging from $2,000 to over $10,000, this is an impossible expense for many scholars whose institutions lack the large-scale “Read and Publish” agreements common in the North. 

This effectively creates an “access for a fee” system that reinforces the financial barrier for non-wealthy researchers. Finally, language barriers and unfamiliarity with the conventions of Western scholarship often lead to manuscript rejection, even if the research itself is sound. Researchers often have to do all the heavy lifting—from conceiving the question to statistical analysis and professional editing—which is a stark contrast to the highly supported research environments found in the Global North.

The Rise of Diamond Open Access: A Southern Innovation

One of the most exciting and transformative trends emerging from the Global South is the pioneering and widespread adoption of Diamond Open Access. Forget Gold OA, which still requires authors or their funders to pay those often-ridiculous APCs. Diamond OA is the truly equitable model: free to read and free to publish in. This isn’t a new concept in the South; it’s a model built out of necessity and a commitment to knowledge as a public good, predating its recent traction in Europe and North America.

Latin America, in particular, has been a global leader in this space for decades. Initiatives like SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online), launched in Brazil in 1997, and Redalyc (Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina y el Caribe) were created to bypass the commercial publishing system entirely. These platforms are publicly funded, non-profit, and scholar-led, providing a robust infrastructure for thousands of high-quality, peer-reviewed journals to operate without charging authors or readers. 

This non-commercial approach ensures that participation in the global scholarly conversation is based on merit, not on the wealth of an author’s institution. In Africa, platforms like African Journals Online (AJOL), which support hundreds of African-published scholarly journals, serve a similar function by providing a centralized, accessible, and quality-controlled online presence for locally-relevant research.

Digital Infrastructure and Local Capacity Building

The future of Southern publishing hinges not just on new business models but on robust, resilient, and locally-controlled digital infrastructure. You can’t run a world-class publishing operation from a place with poor internet connectivity, unreliable power, or fragmented institutional repositories. This is why multi-institutional and regional collaborations are so critical, moving scholarly communication from isolated, single-university efforts to coherent, collective platforms.

Key initiatives are already tackling this. The African Open Science Platform (AOSP), alongside regional networks like the West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN) and UbuntuNet Alliance, is working to build the necessary digital backbone. This involves developing institutional repositories, promoting FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable), and creating a community hub for African scientists. 

In a significant sign of transnational solidarity, the Latin American network LA Referencia has collaborated with African regional networks to formalize their relationship, aiming to advance open science policies and infrastructure that reflect local needs. This cross-continental exchange ensures that lessons learned in one region—like Latin America’s success with Diamond OA—can be adopted and adapted effectively in another.

Rethinking Research Assessment and Metrics

The persistent marginalization of Southern scholarship is directly tied to the global academic reward system. Promotion, tenure, and funding decisions are often heavily weighted by publication in journals indexed in proprietary, North-centric databases like Scopus or the Web of Science, and by the journals’ associated impact factors. These metrics inherently privilege the publishing models and research agendas of the Global North, effectively penalizing scholars who publish in local, regional, or Diamond OA journals, even if those journals are far more relevant to their local context and development needs.

A crucial development for the future is the growing momentum behind Research Assessment Reform. Influential global movements like DORA (Declaration on Research Assessment) and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) are pushing for evaluation criteria that move away from reliance on the journal Impact Factor. The Global South is leading this charge by proposing alternatives that value research for its societal benefit and local relevance. 

For instance, the Latin American Forum on Research Evaluation (FOLEC) advocates for the use of “socio-territorial metrics,” which assess scientific contributions based on community engagement, regional policy influence, and cultural relevance, rather than just citation counts in international indexes. This shift in mindset, from measuring where research is published to measuring the real-world impact it has, is perhaps the single most crucial step in creating an equitable global publishing system.

Conclusion

The future of academic publishing in the Global South is not about a quiet integration into the existing North-dominated system; it’s about a radical restructuring of that system. The challenges are formidable: from battling financial exclusion via onerous APCs and closing the gap in digital infrastructure, to dismantling the biased research assessment metrics that have long devalued local scholarship. Yet, the momentum for change is palpable and driven by homegrown innovation.

The rise of sustainable, publicly-funded models like Diamond Open Access in Latin America and the concerted efforts to build shared digital infrastructure across Africa are creating a blueprint for a more equitable future. This future is one where scholarly communication is treated as a public good, not a commodity for profit. It will be a world where an agricultural scientist in Ghana can publish impactful, peer-reviewed work in a quality regional journal and have that work valued for its influence on local food security, rather than being forced to chase an elusive Impact Factor in a distant, often irrelevant, journal. 

The struggle is far from over, but the Global South is rapidly moving from being a supplicant for access to being the architect of a fairer, more inclusive global scholarly commons.

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