Editor’s note: Today’s guest post is by Nwachukwu Egbunike, PhD, head of the Pan-Atlantic University Press in Lagos, Nigeria.
I recently prepared a research paper on the disruptive politics of African youth for a well-established academic journal. My research agenda for the past two decades fits well with the journal’s call for papers, and I devoted two months to completing the paper and beginning the submission process. I proceeded until I encountered the request for an Author Processing Charge (APC). Initially, I thought that this was the usual request — either to go open access (OA) with an article processing charge (APC) or the traditional publishing route without an APC. But it was entirely different; I had to accept paying the APC before I continued the submission process. Because I had already invested a considerable amount of time and resources in this article, I continued. The journal asked me to pay a “modest” APC of about $2,000 USD, or 2.8 million NGN — the cost of renting a flat in Lagos Island for two years. I appealed this, and the publishers “graciously” granted me a 20% discount.
Needless to say, I am currently shopping for another journal for my paper.
My unfortunate experience illustrates the dynamics that African scholars face in our global knowledge ecosystem. As a publisher, I empathize with the journal publishers, as they must make a profit or perish. At the same time, as a scholar, I cannot access the publication funds from my university, and I did not receive grants for my research; it was self-funded.
This experience raises some fundamental issues: who owns our knowledge — the author, powerful peer-reviewers, or commercial academic publishers? And how does Open Access complicate the answer, particularly with regard for African authors and publishers?
The Global Knowledge Economy
The dominant publishing regions are the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and Asia. Africa remains an emerging market, when compared to the high research output and global citation dominance of the US, UK, and Europe, which maintain great influence in shaping OA policies.
This is particularly obvious in academic publishing, which relies on peer-review to validate knowledge. Every academic publisher makes a tacit decision to trust knowledge producers with a pedigree of high-impact publications and affiliation with institutions in the Global North. With strong university funding, access to research grants, and high infrastructural and institutional support, these scholars can seamlessly contribute to the creation of knowledge, which is then validated within structures entrenched in the Western-centric indexing databases like Scopus and Web of Science.
Even the gatekeeping of knowledge production heavily favors the privileged. The cycle continues with more economic gains made by big publishers across the US, UK, and Europe. These publishers are among the champions of OA models as a solution to global knowledge inequality. Ironically, these same publishers are beneficiaries of the licensing fees and APCs from OA publications. Where are emerging African academic publishers in this conversation?
African University Presses: Brief History and Epistemic Knowledge Sovereignty
The rise of African university presses can be traced back to the mid-twentieth century, coinciding with the formation of new universities in post-independence Africa. One of the pioneers, the University of Ibadan Press in Nigeria (established in 1949), set a standard for other presses across the continent. These early university presses were created with the goal of fostering local scholarship, publishing academic works, and lessening the reliance on foreign publishing houses. In the following years, additional presses sprang up in South Africa, Kenya, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Senegal. Recently, there has been a strong push towards embracing digital innovation, promoting open access, and fostering international partnerships as ways to breathe new life into African scholarly publishing.
Despite their significant role, African university presses experience ongoing challenges that are indicative of their sociopolitical landscape:
- Most African countries face harsh economic realities characterised by high poverty rates, extreme un-/under-employment, weak institutions, scarce infrastructure, and a high debt burden.
- Low reading culture exists in most African countries. Nigeria, South Africa, and Egypt have the lowest reading culture indexes in the world, according to the 2024 World Culture Statistics, News Agency of Nigeria. This is exacerbated by the exorbitant rate of book production, the shortage of bookshops, and insufficient libraries. Poverty and economic hardship are equally accountable for the poor reading culture, as many simply cannot afford books.
- Inaccessibility of research funding is another challenge; without access to research grants, African universities cannot afford to accept and nurture PhD candidates who will push the frontiers of knowledge and publish their research outputs in open-access journals, which require fees.
- The global knowledge economy thrives on citation matrices in high-impact publications. As of 2024, the US (North America) has over 32.11 citations per document and an h-index of 3,051. The United Kingdom (Europe) boasts of 29.92 citations per document and an h-index of 1,928, while China (Asia) has 14.06 citations per document and an h-index of 1,333. On the same list, South Africa has only 19.01 citations per document and an h-index of 652, while Egypt has only 14.93 citations per document and an h-index of 409.
In addition, the lasting effects of colonialism on knowledge production in African universities are still evident today in the ways knowledge is conceived and structured. This is not surprising, given that many public African institutions established during colonial times continue to operate within frameworks rooted in postcolonial models of knowledge production and development. As a result, postcolonial Africa remains engaged in a complex dialogue about the creation, validation, and dissemination of knowledge both within its borders and beyond.
African university presses must revive indigenous knowledge systems, decolonize their educational content, and assert their intellectual autonomy in the global knowledge landscape. However, how will they achieve these ambitious objectives while striving to survive in an economically hampered continent? How can African university presses be better positioned to attain their respective missions, serving the academic needs of the continent while competing as equals in the global knowledge economy?
Case Study: Pan-Atlantic University Press
Founded in 2017, Pan-Atlantic University Press (PAU Press) published six titles between 2017 and 2021. Following its restructuring in 2022 by the university’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Enase Okonedo, the Press has published 15 academic books, five inaugural lectures, and two volumes of a communication journal.
The Press has expanded our distribution outlets to more than 10 local bookshops and four online outlets. In 2023, we were the first Nigerian university press to sign a memo of understanding to partner with the Committee for Relevant Arts (CORA), Nigeria’s foremost cultural organization dedicated to promoting books and the arts.
My team has also worked tirelessly to sell our titles through Amazon and partner with the African Books Collective to extend our reach to readers in America, Europe, and Commonwealth countries. We joined CrossRef in 2024, were unanimously approved for affiliate membership in the Association of University Presses earlier this year — the fourth African university press to join the association—and in September, we onboarded our titles on Johns Hopkins University Press’ Project MUSE.
In 2024, Professor Okonedo approved our African Interdisciplinary Series (AIS), a book series that intersects the study of business, communication, politics, and philosophy. Under the direction of a stellar editorial board comprising African scholars from diverse regions and institutions, we expect to publish the first four books in the series in 2026 and 2027.
The success story of PAU Press is not magical, but a result of strategic positioning:
- Beginning in 2022, Professor Okonedo inserted the Press at the heart of the university’s five-year strategic plan for academic excellence, advancing the university’s “Scholarship & Research” and “Teaching & Learning” objectives — goals that we reflect in our own strategic plan.
- Professor Okonedo repositioned the Press by ensuring that I, as the head of the Press, report directly to her.
- The university is committed to making a yearly grant to the Press to push this ambitious vision of being the flagship of scholarly publishing in Africa.
- The dedication and commitment of my team (Muideen Kolade, Osasogie Ogieriakhi, Linda Duru, and Nneoma Onyenahazi) made the impossible seem normal.
- Community, both internal and external, has been imperative in the Press’ expansive growth, thus reaffirming these two African sayings: “We are stronger together” (Igwebuike) and “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
Open Access: Promise and Paradox
The intent of OA, as articulated by the Budapest Open Access Initiative over 20 years ago, was predicated on the revolutionary power of digital technologies to break barriers and make knowledge accessible to all. Yet today, the thin line between knowledge sharing and knowledge protection is still unresolved, the dilemma of upholding proprietary intellectual rights versus making knowledge widely available to all.
Another OA paradox revolves around the conviction that digital technologies inherently benefit marginalized or vulnerable populations, which makes it unsurprising that OA champions would not have imagined the digital divide with its attendant political or socioeconomic constraints. But more importantly, one of the ironies of OA is the Western-centric assumption that knowledge is neutral. For those of us from the Global South, carrying the deadweight of colonialism, knowledge has never been neutral. It has been either a force for good or evil, a tool for unity or oppression, depending on who wields it.
Colonialism established a framework of knowledge dominance, where all understanding was primarily filtered through a European or Western perspective, accompanied by the systematic suppression of all forms of knowledge production from the colonized cultures. The colonizers not only forcibly imposed their knowledge on the colonized but also established it as the “dominant” knowledge system.
Similarly, the danger of assuming that digital technologies will necessarily destroy barriers without contextualization is delusional. Africa’s cultural and linguistic diversity has been erased with digitalization, leading to an epistemic exclusion. Without historical accountability and local memory, digital technologies, the backbone of Open Access, will only continue to alienate African knowledge systems.
OA is not free, without expectation of payment. We are either paying money or subverting our indigenous local systems, culture, and language for it.
Charting a New Course
OA must be reformed. Here are some alternatives.
The first is empowering African institutions to be fully equipped to participate in the global scholarly conversation. This includes, but is not limited to:
- Capacity building: Training and retraining staff, since many of Africa’s brightest minds are migrating (japa) to the West.
- Sustainable funding: Funding from our universities as well as external sources.
- Expanding channels of distribution: Citation is the fuel of academic life. But African publishers will only start making an impact in the global knowledge ecosystem when their books and journals begin to cross the Atlantic with greater ease.
The second is partnerships that respect local autonomy. I am advocating for a solidarity rooted in mutual respect and gain for both parties. For instance, let’s imagine that an American university press partners with an African university press in accessing and project-managing grants of funding, training and human capacity development, or other activities. In exchange, the African press would provide its partner with an opening to enter the African market with the sale of their titles. The staff exchanges between both presses will certainly profit both organizations as well.
The third is reimagining a more inclusive and equitable knowledge ecosystem where the validation of knowledge is not the exclusive preserve of Western-centric data indexing repositories. As it stands, most African publishers are excluded from knowledge conversations because their publications are not indexed on Scopus or Web of Science. Simultaneously, the demands to be indexed are often unattainable for African scholarly publishers due to a lack of capacity, funding, or harsh economic realities. I am not advocating for the watering down of standards or diversity and inclusion tokenism. Nonetheless, we cannot ignore the systemic inequalities that exclude a section of the world from the global knowledge ecosystem.
Conclusion
The global knowledge ecosystem excludes the Global South. Africa must work harder to insert its knowledge systems within the global scholarly landscape through building partnerships that nurture and respect local agency, engaging in cooperative and strategic planning, and committing fully to the exchange of ideas. The days of working in silos are over.
We must build inclusive and equitable publishing futures, which center the knowledge creator in the process. Open Access must adapt or perish. There is an urgent need for further modification, so that OA can achieve its promise within the complexities of current realities.
Knowledge is not neutral — it reflects power. Let us build inclusive systems that wield it wisely.
Author’s note: This article was originally presented as a keynote lecture hosted by the University of Michigan Press at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor during International Open Access Week, October 2025.
Interested in reading more? Here are some recommended resources:
- Arowosegbe, J. O. (2023). African universities and the challenge of postcolonial development. Africa, 93(5), 591-614.
- Caswell, D. (2022). “Producing News in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” MedienWirtschaft, 19(3), 12-16.
- Drahos, P., & Braithwaite, J. (2017). Information feudalism: Who owns the knowledge economy. Routledge.
- Egbunike, N. A. (2026). “Digital Transformation of Book Publishing in Nigeria: Stillbirth, Stunted Growth or Both?” In Obiaya, I., Ogedi Alakwe, K., & Nzeaka, E. (Eds). Nigeria’s Cultural and Creative Industry: Perspectives, Problems, and Prospects. London: Routledge, pp 155-169
- Falola, T. (2022). Decolonizing African studies: Knowledge production, agency, and voice (Vol. 93). Boydell & Brewer
- Kioko, P. M., Booker, N., Chege, N., & Kimweli, P. (2022). “The Adoption of Artificial Intelligence in Newsrooms” in Kenya: a Multi-case Study. European Scientific Journal, ESJ, 18 (22), 278.
Discussion
9 Thoughts on "Guest Post — Who Owns Our Knowledge? An African University Press Perspective"
I noted with interest the recent and significant funding provided by the Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) Fund to the UbuntuNet Alliance for Research and Education Networking, which focuses on Eastern and South African National Research and Education Networks (https://investinopen.org/blog/empowering-networks-advancing-openness-invest-in-open-infrastructure-announces-inaugural-grantees-of-the-ioi-fund-for-network-adoption/). Shared open infrastructure looks like one effective way to reduce the barriers to knowledge inequality. What are your thoughts on this, and are there plans to expand the scope of initiatives like this to West Africa?
Thanks for sharing this important initiative. It is worth exploring and I will be glad to follow up on this. I can be reached via email on my bio.
The author raises important concerns about structural inequities in the global research ecosystem. However, as someone who strongly supports Open Access (OA), I feel compelled to push back on the increasingly common narrative that frames OA itself as the source of these inequities.
Too often the “equity” argument is deployed either to discredit OA or—ironically—by legacy publishers as a marketing device to justify subscription systems, read-and-publish agreements, or S2O models. All of these approaches introduce their own inequities and cost distortions. They should not be conflated with the core principles of the OA movement as articulated in the Budapest Open Access Initiative.
From an OA perspective, the answer to the article’s central question—“Who owns our knowledge?”—is straightforward: the authors do. Under permissive licenses such as Creative Commons Attribution License, authors retain the right to share and reuse their work while making it freely available to anyone with an internet connection.
The real question is not ownership but control over knowledge production. Publishing should be understood as part of the research lifecycle—essentially a “knowledge translation” cost within the research budget. The deeper inequity lies in the global distribution of wealth and research funding. Many African countries invest very little in R&D relative to GDP, which naturally constrains research output and the ability to fund dissemination. OA did not create this imbalance; if anything, it simply makes it more visible.
It is also worth asking whether it is desirable—or sustainable—to expect publication opportunities without corresponding research funding. In most research systems, dissemination costs are considered a normal component of research expenditure. Publication costs need to be covered by research funders as they are the ones who benefit from quality control and dissemination. Institutions or nations should create equity funds (e.g. institutional open access funds) for special research groups like students or early career researchers to support those without research funding.
At the same time, OA has already provided a mechanism for disseminating research at effectively zero marginal cost: the internet itself. Preprint servers and institutional repositories allow researchers to share findings globally without APCs. In that sense, the “promise” of digital dissemination lowering barriers has largely been fulfilled.
Another question worth reflecting on is why the author initially submitted the paper to a “well-established” Western journal rather than publishing locally or posting a preprint. The likely answer is the certification function of peer review and the reputational incentives embedded in academic promotion systems. These incentives—rather than OA itself—are what reinforce global hierarchies in scholarly communication.
This suggests that one productive path forward for African research systems may be to avoid replicating the incentive structures created in the Global North. Regions such as Latin America have demonstrated viable alternatives: publicly funded diamond OA journals, regional indexing systems, and strong preprint infrastructures that operate without APCs. Building similar ecosystems—staffed by local editors and decoupled from promotion requirements tied to Western journals—may offer a more sustainable route to knowledge sovereignty.
Finally, it is worth noting that open access support by Coaltion S funders already require APC waivers or discounts for authors from low- and middle-income countries. Whether such cross-subsidization is scalable is an open question; if implemented broadly it may simply raise APCs further while asking Western funders to subsidize global publishing infrastructure.
In short, the inequities described in the article are real—but they stem primarily from disparities in research funding, infrastructure, and academic incentives. Open Access did not create these problems. If anything, it exposes them and offers tools that could enable more locally controlled publishing ecosystems.
Thank you very much for this thoughtful and substantive engagement. I am grateful for your delicate unpacking the inherent structural questions around Open Access, funding models, and global research inequities.
I agree that OA, in principle, is not the source of these disparities. Which means that I share your perspective that the core ideals of the Budapest Open Access Initiative remain vital and worth defending.
That said, it was never my intention to conflate OA with inequitable systems. Rather, my core objective was to highlight how, OA implementation intersect with deeper structural issues already present in the scholarly communication landscape. I hope you will understand my perspective, as a scholar and scholarly publisher from the Global South, with an unpleasant lived experience of these issues.
As you rightly noted, the heart of the matter is “control and the global distribution of research power”, not authorship alone. But we cannot talk about power emanating from the asymmetric global knowledge ecosystem without peering into the domain of knowledge ownership, within the existing matrix. For emphasis, my argument is that for many African institutions, OA exists within an ecosystem they did not design and cannot yet fully shape. In such contexts, even models intended to democratize knowledge may reproduce older hierarchies unless local capacity, funding, and institutional incentives evolve alongside them.
I also appreciate your point about regional alternatives such as Latin America’s diamond OA ecosystems. These models offer compelling examples of what more “locally governed, publicly funded, and culturally aligned” infrastructures can look like. This is an aspiration I believe many African institutions share, even if the pathway toward it requires sustained investment and policy alignment.
Regarding your question about journal choice: you’re correct that reputational systems heavily influence where scholars submit. Part of the argument in the article is precisely that these incentive structures need reimagining if we are to build truly sovereign African knowledge systems in the long term. Otherwise, we are caught up in cycle in which the tail continues to wag the dog, while pretending that the dog has full agency.
Thank you once again for your generous and rigorous contribution to the discussion. Exchanges like this are exactly what move the conversation forward. I’m grateful for the opportunity to reflect further on how we might align OA principles with equitable global practice.
Thank you for this post. It was of particular interest to me, as many years ago when completing my master’s in publishing and writing, I wrote a thesis on the lack of a reading culture among black South Africans, tying it to not to their culture of oral story-telling per se, but to their education (or lack thereof) under colonialism and apartheid and, importantly, to what publishing houses in SA were and were not publishing, post-apartheid in particular. Also, one point not mentioned explicitly in the post is the gatekeeping of knowledge that happens via peer review. As the executive editor of a well-known international scholarly journal based at a US university, I struggle with the gatekeeping I do every day because our peer review process decides what is “good” science and “good” research through the lens of scholars from the same group of countries this post cites as dominating academic publishing. To fully decolonize the publishing process, we must open up the peer review process fully to scholars from Africa and other underrepresented parts of the world.
Many thanks Emily for your comment.
The original keynote address contained the asymmetric gatekeeping of peer-reviewers. While it remains an important scaffolding for validation of knowledge. We cannot remain silent that many times, Western-centric peer-reviewers impose their dominance on what is considered ‘good’ or ‘bad’ knowledge on non-Western scholars, particularly Africans.
However, African scholars must not wait to be granted access to knowledge gatekeeping as a token of inclusion and diversity. They must also do the necessary work to expose their scholarship to global best standards. Despite the inherent obstacles.
Thank you for your comment once again.
You are right. The aspect of inequalities surrounding knowledge peer-review, was in the initial speech. That’s sad reality of producing knowledge from the African continent.
I appreciate you for this piece. I wanna raise following concerns:
1. APCs are requested after the final acceptance of an article submitted to a journal works on gold open access model or hybrid model, if author choose to publish OA. So, journal didn’t ask for APC in your case or you or journal termed it incorrectly.
2. Some journals impose a “Submission Fee” to create a barrier to authors’ unethical behavior like withdrawing articles during review phase, or after final acceptance, or authors’ behavior of taking editorial instructions for granted.
3. Why didn’t you read journal’s instructions on their publication model and fee details before preparing the article? During my editorial career, I see many times where authors don’t pay attention to journal’s instructions to the authors and policies and blame the journals afterwards. This is, in fact, your case.
Recently, I encountered a case from Africa. The author doesn’t pay heed to desk and peer review comments and when he was asked by editorial office to follow the instructions, he withdrew article and blamed the journal. In addition to predatory behavior of some journals, authors’ unethical and taking instructions for granted behaviors should also be noticed.
I keep coming back to the same question: at what point does someone working in academic publishing, whether here in the United States, over in Europe, or anywhere else in the developed world, admit to themselves the industry they’re part of runs on colonial habits?
Because from where I’m sitting, it’s hard to see it any other way. Academic publishing likes to talk about advancing knowledge and serving the global scholarly community. But when you follow the money and the power, the pattern’s pretty plain: the system is built to benefit institutions and professionals in the global North, while scholars in the global South are too often left scrambling for access, recognition, or a fair seat at the table.
Now, I know plenty of people in publishing are decent and just doing their jobs. I’m not questioning their intentions. But good intentions don’t change the structure of the thing. For decades this industry has made profit off publicly funded research while putting up barriers that keep large parts of the world on the outside looking in.
So I can’t help but ask: how long are we supposed to pretend this is just the normal way scholarship works? Because if we’re being honest, a system that extracts value from global knowledge while concentrating prestige, access, and profit in the North looks like colonialism slipping in through the back door.
And that brings it right back to the people inside the system. At some point, each of us has to decide what story we’re telling ourselves about the work we do. Ask yourself, are you just drawing a healthy salary while helping keep a system in place that deepens the very injustices it ought to be dismantling.
[True name withheld, because I may well need new a job in this industry one day myself, and that is the bind a lot of us find ourselves in]
