As discussed on our Scholarly Sources page, the "scholarly communication" process refers to the publication process in academia. You can find it outlined below:
"Scholarly communication" is how we create, share, and disseminate knowledge within an academic context. However, this process can often take the form of gatekeeping, where some knowledge users and/or creators have more privileged access to this system than others. That access (or lack thereof) is what we are referring to when we say "information privilege." Using the above steps as a guide, we've highlighted some of the barriers that exist to participating in this process below.
Faculty--tenured, tenure-track, non-tenured--can spend an extensive period of time researching and drafting a scholarly article. This is all too often unpaid labor that they find time for--or, due to the tenure process, are required to find the time for--on top of their additional job responsibilities. The time as well as the physical and cognitive labor involved in the creation process will impact their professional and personal lives. Furthermore, the continued adjunctification of higher education leaves most contingent faculty out of the process altogether, limiting stable job prospects and creating a permanent underclass of faculty (AAUP, n.d.). This is especially concerning when we look at the racial make-up of full-time faculty countrywide. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (2021), as of fall 2018, around 75% of of all full-time faculty in degree-granting postsecondary institutions are white. Those who identify as Hispanic or Latino and Black or African American, only make up about 12.9% of full-time faculty. Additionally, women, in general, are both underrepresented in the full-time faculty category and overrepresented in contingent positions (AAUP, 2020).
If faculty are permitted the time to conduct research, depending on the individual/group, discipline, and/or institution, the initial creation phase may include grant or fellowship funding secured by the faculty lead. There are a range of inequities faculty may encounter in seeking this funding. For instance, some projects which challenge mainstream, white knowledge systems may not receive funding because they are deemed by larger organizations to be too unconventional, "biased," or "activist" (Inefuku p. 200). Moreover, grants are extremely competitive and often once funding is secured, work for the project may be sustained through additional layers of inequity, including but not limited to, underpaid graduate or undergraduate student assistants.
Finally, the process of creation also includes theoretical and/or empirical research gathered from databases costing institutions thousands of dollars and usually hidden behind institutional logins and passwords.
The inequities addressed in the creation process are further exacerbated once the article is submitted to a journal and the peer review process begins. Conventionally, the “peer-reviewed journal article” must be approved by two (sometimes more) reviewers (faculty) considered experts in the field or discipline. However, as the peer review page in this guide illustrates, the process itself can become inequitable due to reviewer biases, both in the review process itself and, in the case of editors, the scope of the research topics and methodologies that are chosen to be included.
Though the journal may designate a timeline for peer-review, feedback may not reach the individual/group for months. Not only does this cause a great deal of stress for the writers(s), but depending on the discipline, their results/conclusions could be invalidated by swift changes within the field during that time.
Ultimately, reviewers can reject the manuscript, ask for a series of revisions, and/or accept it with minor revisions. The quality of feedback, including the reviewers’ attentiveness to cultural competence, antiracism, and disciplinary social justice issues, may vary greatly.
The economics of scholarly publishing are complicated. As mentioned previously, faculty produce and edit content for scholarly journals, usually as a requirement of their job, without any financial incentive from the publishers. In exchange, publishers then evaluate and distribute the material, usually charging libraries and institutions an extreme mark-up in the process. As the Association of College & Research Libraries (n.d.) notes, "this unusual business model where the "necessary inputs" are provided free of cost to publishers who then in return sell that "input" back to the institutions that pay the salaries of the persons producing it has given rise to an unsustainable system begging for transformation." This is just one of the many ways in which labor within higher education has been monetized to the benefit of corporate interests, often to the detriment of faculty and students. While libraries are able to provide items free to patrons in the short term, the long-term impacts of these costs impact everything from librarian salaries and budgets to the ever-rising cost of tuition (Ellenwood, 2020).
Many of the large academic publishers have created a virtual monopoly on the publishing business, effectively allowing them to charge whatever they want. However, the university also plays a role in this relationship. The institutional pressure for faculty to publish in "high impact" journals (journals with a high number of "citable" items) is strong. However, assessing a journal on impact factor alone (or choosing to publish in one) doesn't take into account the variety editorial practices that may make a journal more or less equitable than others. For more information about the economics of scholarly publishing and the complications of impact factor, please see:
Privileged access to information and information systems can come in many forms and that access can be impacted by a number of intersectional factors, such as access to technology, socioeconomic status, individual identity, or institutional affiliation (Duke University Libraries, n.d.).
Access to scholarly materials, specifically, is often only available via expensive databases that require institutional affiliation or through an individual paid subscription or per article purchase. For example, a single article that may be free at the point of access to CityU students through the library, may cost an individual user anywhere between $20-$50 (non-refundable). As such, access to scholarly material is financially prohibitive to most individual users. This inequitable access is not only a problem at the individual level, but can also stifle scientific progress more broadly, as many are excluded from the scholarly conversation.
Even within academia, there are disparities. For example, a large, well-funded, public university will have access to more funding and materials than a smaller, private institution. Overall, the cost of database and journal subscriptions is rising---studies have shown that since the 1980s, the cost of journal subscriptions has outpaced inflation by around 250%---the amount offered through these subscriptions is dwindling, and library budgets, on the whole, remain stagnant or diminished (Bosch et al, 2020; Meadowcroft, 2020; Open Society Foundations, 2018).
The academic article is a commodity. Scholars are not paid by publishers for their contributions and publishers grossly overcharge libraries/universities so that scholars may have the privilege to access their own intellectual property and that of their peers. This exploitation of intellectual labor is a growing problem that academia must challenge.
Everything we've discussed up until this point reflects whose voices are heard and prioritized, what counts as "knowledge," and who can be creators and holders of knowledge. When we only publish or value certain identities, topics, or viewpoints for publication, those voices are the ones that get preserved and reused over time. It is no secret that academic institutions, whether public or private, are elitist and exclusionary. This is due to a range of interconnected historical, sociocultural, racist, classist, sexist, ageist, and ableist factors which have solidified over at least the past two centuries. By extension, the knowledge that academia generates and circulates through the scholarly communication process reflects this exclusivity and entrenchment in white supremacy (Inefuku, 2021).
Preserving scholarly articles---and making them available for reuse---relies on several factors, including database indexing, subject headings, and promotion. And as you may have guessed, database indexing and subject headings can be heavily skewed towards whiteness and mainstream disciplinary topics. Librarians can do a lot to help combat this inequity; they may highlight articles on intersectional topics in research sessions and/or link them on guides for students, faculty, and staff to more easily access. They can also use tagging features to help bridge the gap between content and available indexing terms.
Preservation can also involve institutional repositories and archives. Many universities have online repositories where students, faculty, and/or staff can upload papers, capstones, articles, and other projects. Equally, archives--digital and non-digital--often preserve vital documents, including publications by scholars. But if these repositories and archives are hidden or they're only accessible to people at the institution, articles may be well-preserved, but not readily reusable.
A final consideration is copyright. Once the article is published, who does it belong to and who has the "right" to use? And in what manner? Copyright doesn't always solely belong to the author(s) after publication and increasingly, faculty and librarians have had to wrestle with copyright issues when creating class or seminar reading lists.