Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum Open access publication: Academic colonialism or knowledge philanthropy? Papia Sengupta Centre for Political Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. India ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Open access Academic-colonialism Global South Knowledge Public-good Exclusion ABSTRACT Open access (OA) publication of scholarly articles in journals has come to be celebrated as opening up new knowledge base to researchers, making knowledge a 'public-good'. What seems to have gone amiss is a deep- seeded exclusion and discrimination that OA furthers by being blind to authors' location. I argue that OA en- trenches prevailing 'academic colonialism', without any reflection on transforming existing academic hier- archies. The paper brings forth the idea of academiccolonialism leading to a hierarchization of scholarships, wherein the authors belonging to the so-called Global South stand at a disadvantage. 1. Introduction What is open access? This is the primary question necessary to understand and initiate any debate on whether it is good or bad, ad- vantageous, or like all other platforms and avenues for publication, have both pros and cons. “Open Access is when publications are freely available online to all at no cost and with limited restrictions regarding reuse. The Springer Publications website defines the fundamentals of OA as unrestricted distribution of research is important for authors (as their work gets seen by more people), readers (as they can access and build on the most recent work in the field) and funders (as the work they fund has broader impact by being able to reach a wider audience) (https://www.springer.com/gp/authors-editors/ authorandreviewertutorials/open-access/what-is-open-access/ 10286522). OA, thus makes scholarly articles published online acces- sible to all without paying a fee or subscribing them. The Taylor and Francis website, describes OA as “accelerat[ing] research, enrich edu- cation, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foun- dation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.” Peter Suber, the Director of Harvard Open Access Project, says OA is the convergence of tradition and a new technology, making possible an unprecedented public good” (Suber, 2002; Guedon, 2017). Here the ‘old tradition’ implies scientific ethos and the ‘new technology’ is the internet. While agreeing with Suber (2002) that, open access brings the old and new technology together, I cannot uncritically accept that OA has made knowledge a public-good. My reason for this disagreement is that the primary question to pose while discussing any knowledge discourse is: who is writing from where? (Mignolo, 1993). This essentially puts the pointer to the geographical, economic, social, political, gender positioning of the authors, which cannot be neglected in any discussion on OA, as location has a bearing on the opportunities available to au- thors. OA is a “development in the scientific publishing world has led to a state of neo-colonialism at the source, where what is being published [mostly] comes from that part of the World which can afford to pay the publication costs…opening up access may be equal to closing it at the other end” (Valsiner, 2006). 2. Location, location, location: Scientific-academic research and hidden privileges Let me elaborate the question who is writing from where further, to show how location of author impinges deeply on the arguments on OA and APC, more importantly on knowledge-generation and knowledge- creation. The countries of the world designated earlier as the third world (during the cold war) and then the ‘developing’ world has come to be considered mostly as an area to be studied and not a place from which to speak. The countries and authors belonging to the so-called ‘Global-South’ have always been speaking and writing (Coronil, 1993; Wald, 1992 as referred by Mignolo, 1993), it is another matter that their work mostly goes unnoticed and often not considered ‘scientific’ enough by the commercial publishing houses of the North. An im- portant factor is that most of these works are not written in English and even if they are, gets published in non-digital platforms, which are not accounted by the Web of Science. This process alone is exclusionary and discriminatory, howsoever unintentional; the upshot is the authors who cannot pay for their work to be published as OA. This adds to the ex- isting hierarchy of knowledge generation and creation, considered as a prerogative of the rich and powerful developed world. The commercial https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.04.001 Received 16 March 2020; Accepted 2 April 2020 E-mail address: papiasg@jnu.ac.in. Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 0016-7185/ © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Papia Sengupta, Geoforum, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.04.001