A Decolonized Approach to Scholarly Communication - FSCI2020

At the beginning of August, I took part in the 2020 Force11 Scholarly Communication Institute (FSCI2020) virtual conference. Participants at FSCI attend courses that focus on one area of scholarly communication, for example, SFU Librarian Kate Shuttleworth wrote about the course "Collaboration, Communities and Collectives: Understanding Collaboration in the Scholarly Commons" in her blog post about FSCI 2018. In this new remote version of the conference, I joined twice weekly sessions to learn about and discuss my course, as well as joining plenary presentations, lightning talks, informal social conversations, and a series of panels on FAIR data.

For my course, I chose "A Decolonized Approach to Scholarly Communication." The goal of the course was to "identify and avoid colonial practices in scholarly communication" and was led by Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou.

In this course, we were introduced to ideas of coloniality in scholarly communication, including how the current model of open access still emphasizes and centers Western ways of thinking. The system of publication in high prestige journals that is essential for success in many fields comes from the Global North and is imposed on the Global South through wealth, knowledge hegemony, and cultural dominance.

One anecdote from Marcel Knöchelmann's article "The Democratisation Myth: Open Access and the Solidification of Epistemic Injustices" gave me an 'A-ha!' moment in thinking about issues of epistemic injustice in scholarly communication. Knöchelmann summarizes an anecdote promoting open access in which an article, published in a European journal, could have helped Liberian officials during an Ebola outbreak had it been published open access. Knöchelmann asks us to "consider the question of why [the authors] have not published their research in a Liberian or African journal in the first place. It was not a paywall preventing them from doing so" (p. 5).

I appreciated hearing from other course participants around the world about how they saw this topic and discussing how different parts of the academic system could change or evolve to address the legacies of colonialism. There aren't any easy answers for such a big topic but participating in FSCI2020 gave me a jumpstart in thinking about them.

For more information about Force11 and FSCI, visit https://www.force11.org/
 

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