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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue |
Title: | Themed section: Discrimination in scholarly publishing |
Author: | le Roux, Elizabeth |
Year: | 2015 |
Periodical: | Critical Arts: A Journal of Media Studies (ISSN 1992-6049) |
Volume: | 29 |
Issue: | 6 |
Pages: | 703-784 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | South Africa |
Subjects: | science publishing academic standards discrimination gender Africans |
External link: | https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rcrc20/29/6?nav=tocList |
Abstract: | Studies conducted internationally, including in the United States, the United Kingdom and Sweden, indicate that discrimination does take place against women and ethnic groups in scholarly publishing. Discriminatory practices may include, amongst others, unfair reviewing and exclusion from 'old boys' networks'. The values that underlie the scholarly communication system - such as the maintenance of 'high standards' - may also function to exclude. South Africa's system of accrediting journals exacerbates existing inequalities in the global knowledge production arena. This section of this issue of Critical Arts examines the perceptions and realities of discriminatory practices in academic and scholarly publishing in South Africa. Donal P. McCracken focuses on subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle discrimination authors may experience in the enforced relationship with their publisher; Keyan Tomaselli discusses the issue of peer review and examines allegations of racism, anti-African attitudes, and viewpoint discrimination in terms of claims of Western conceptual gatekeeping. Herman Wasserman and Ian Richards - themselves editors of peer-reviewed journals - concentrate on the views of journal editors with regard to the dissemination of scholarship and the imbalances of global knowledge production. They distributed an online questionnaire to the editors of 24 journals in the fields of communication, journalism and journalism studies. Aiming to provide basic data to underpin perceptions of discrimination in the selection of books for publication, Elizabeth le Roux gives an overview of author selection at South Africa's most prominent scholarly publishers, its university presses, through a case study of the author profiles of Wits, Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal), Unisa and Cape Town. The author profiles of these university presses shows some change over time, towards greater diversity in terms of both race and gender. However, women and black authors - and black women authors especially - remain under-represented. In the last contribution, Relebohile Moletsane, Louise Haysome and Vasu Reddy consider how 'Agenda', a feminist journal of the Global South, and Africa specifically, balances the demands of peer-reviewed knowledge production with prerequisite gender, race and space/place equality in the context of mechanisms that often privilege particular ways of knowing. The article addresses questions such as: what forces inhibit and marginalise women's voices generally, and black women's voices in particular, from feminist knowledge production and dissemination? Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [ASC Leiden abstract] |