Knowledge Production Ethos and Open Access Publishing: Africa in Focus

This article examines open access from the viewpoint of a neo-liberal science ethos such as article-processing charges, epithets of predatory publishing, and the texture of global open access policies. Synthesizing existing literature in the field, the article avers that, in its present structure, open access appears to be a tool for propagating a Western mode of knowledge. Existing frameworks for studying knowledge production have points of discontinuities that create a lever for excluding knowledge not produced in other mainstream contexts from a global reckoning. Finally, we engage the identified discontinuities and suggest how open access could be made to work in Africa.