As this chapter laid out, presentday scholarly communication has, in prin
ciple, worldwide reach, and it operates with its own inner logic of methods and theories, connecting contributions via referencing. It is an autonom
ous social system that, with its highly specialised communication, fulfils a
68 A collaborative investigation about ‘predatory publishing’ involving 60 reporters worldwide reached broad global news coverage JulyAugust 2018; see e. g. Yadav 2018.
certain function in world society; namely, providing it with new and reli
able academic knowledge. However, the research system fails to provide all communities with this. While this chapter helps point out some elements of ‘Global North’ privilege built into the system, further considerations are necessary to understand why, regardless of quality, research results pro
duced by researchers in the ‘periphery’ remain hardly visible. This will be the focus of the following chapter.
This chapter aimed at explaining how the research system constructs itself as global. The short and simple answer is: because the terms ‘science’ and
‘research’ are often used without defining a place. Through colonisation, the ‘Global North’ hindered local ‘Global South’ knowledge production and reception systems from prospering, and succeeded in pushing them to the margins, alongside the research system, while the latter was institution
alised in basically all countries of the ‘Global South’. Eigenstructures of this global research system can most evidently be observed when looking at the similarities of the national institutions, as e. g. the neoinstitutional approach does. However, for different disciplines of the SSH, debates about their own globality manifest that expectations about what this entails are currently disappointed and contested.
After the liberation from political colonialism, ‘Global North’ researchers hardly changed their perspective on the ‘South’ and its research. Develop
mentalism and the Cold War, together with the global implementation of area studies, stabilised a degrading view. Area studies, as the reinvention or continuation of colonial anthropology, incarcerated the work of Indian musicologists, Nigerian historians, Chilean sociologists, et cetera, in the event they decided to study their local environments, and made it difficult for them to participate in their canonised ‘mother disciplines’.
The chapter also provided initial explanations for why certain academic publications are less likely to be discovered and referred to by others. ISI citation indexes, when first developed, have been primarily intended as in
formation retrieval tools. However, distributors of research funding soon used them as the principal monitor for the research system. Since the inclu
sion of research results in this monitor is especially unlikely when these ori
ginate in the ‘Global South’, depending on the nontransparent decisions
of a private company, neglect is integrally reproduced in the research sys
tem. Mainstream bibliometrics, and the inclusion processes of the data
bases they rely on, help to prevent the system from changing. I therefore suggest decolonial bibliometrics that do not rely on citation indexes cur
ated based on questionable criteria (see Chapter 4).
The problematic role of academic libraries as mediators between com
mercial information suppliers and researchers has also been addressed in this chapter. Selection processes are increasingly outsourced, partly to un
paid users. Instead, libraries provide help desks as well as monitoring and marketing services for the suppliers’ products. Their justification as pub
lic administration organisations has been adapted to neoliberal terms, fol
lowing economic interests. The libraries’ agency in arranging records of knowledge minimises.
Open access paired with notforprofit organisations that help with the creation of trust and discoverability might sound like a good solution, but business models are critical: when fees to the publisher are paid pre
publication by authors or their institutions, libraries lose their only convin
cing instrument of agency towards the publishers: prices cannot be negoti
ated. Furthermore, researchers in privileged environments clearly are at an advantage once more. The constitution of open access as the new standard comes at a cost that often excludes ‘Global South’ participation, since it requires advanced IT infrastructure and considerable staff resources.
The ‘Global North’ publishing industry increasingly operates without ir
ritation from outside its own organisations. For business organisations, this is an ideal situation, since the future is predictable, especially if competition basically serves as a pool for innovation—products are not interchangeable.
As long as publishers offer similar functionalities on their platforms, con
sumers have no reason to complain, and any added functionality qualifies for a price increase, additional the surplus that is created by tracking users—
users that libraries sent over, unpaid, naturally (see Hanson 2019).
The increasing presence of the notion of ‘diversity’ in library contexts is indicative of a growing concern with social justice. However, in this chapter, it was briefly discussed that ‘diversity management’ might worsen the situation. Instead, the concept of cultural humility was introduced
and will be used in the following. It shifts the focus from ‘the other’ to the selfevaluation of the privileged.
In the final section of this chapter, I established the relationship between the increasing demand for researchers to publish in large quantities, desist
ing from quality, and, on the one hand, a societywide preference for quan
tified communication, and, on the other hand, the emergence of ‘predatory publishing’. The latter has been publicly debated with close reference to
‘Global South’ scholarship, and is thereby disrespecting and repelling it.
In conclusion, the research system certainly has to tackle the problem of a overwhelmingly high volume of previous communication that is poten
tially relevant for topical communication. Complexity needs to be reduced, and technical systems that help with this task, such as relevance rankings in library discovery systems, are welcome since they require negligible in
put effort. If researchers rely on those systems without questioning their more or less complex way of functioning, and do not design reflexive liter
ature research workflows for themselves accordingly, the systems’ internal structures naturally have direct impact on scholarly communication. Only if oversimplification is recognised, and more complexity is allowed, can there be hope for more social justice and cultural humility in the system.
The history of the global establishment of the research system justifies a responsibility of the scholarly communication itself, but also of all institu
tions in service of it, including academic libraries, firstly, to reflect on priv
ilege and to resign from it, and, secondly, to actively oppose it wherever it appears.
Splitting Scholarly Communication
Observing world society as primarily differentiated into worldwide operat
ing function systems does not mean to claim that other forms of differen
tiation cannot be observed (any longer). Specifically, they reappear within social systems. This chapter intends to demonstrate how asymmetric ant
onyms (Koselleck), the handling of distinctions in social systems theory, and border thinking (Mignolo) are helpful for understanding which func
tions constructions such as ‘centre/periphery’ or ‘international journals/
local journals’ lean on. Those dual concepts are rooted in a certain tradition of ‘othering’, and therefore are, as the previous chapter aimed at clarifying, accompanied by social injustice. Besides following up on conceptual dis
cussions, a very selective dive into etymologies and historical analyses will at least help to see more clearly how the research system is structured into centre and periphery.
Social systems theory and decolonial studies both support the following discussion by avoiding actively splitting anything by secondorder obser
vation. Rather, the chapter observes how dichotomies, ‘splits’, have been built into society and into the research system by secondorder observa
tion, evidenced by the scholarly discussion on centre/periphery. I agree with Mignolo (2000, p. 85) that this is ‘thinking from dichotomous con
cepts rather than ordering the world in dichotomies’. By definition, border thinking is a ‘thirdorder observation’ (ibid., p. 87).
The main point of this chapter is that, from a social systems theory per
spective, centre/periphery differentiates social systems, and therefore does
not denominate territories, as in most other definitions.⁶⁹ Instead, it differ
entiates communication, and a territory will therefore never be peripheral itself, but can be referred to as such. I will discuss what can be gained from observing (scholarly) communication as differentiated into centre and peri
phery, without confusing sociological with topological meanings.
When selfreflexive communication about centres and peripheries points at territories, and these references are reproduced very often, they are sta
bilised. My project unavoidably adds to this reproduction in the case of Southeast African SSH (Chapter 4), but I hope that the following discussion of concepts and their reconceptualisation will destabilise these semantics even more so.