Institutional Review: Open Access and Open Knowledge Production Processes: Lessons from CODESRIA
Date
2010-02-15
Authors
Nyamnjoh, Francis
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Publisher
LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg
Abstract
It is common in discussions of open access to limit the issue to publications and dissemination. This conflates accessibility with recognition and representation, and supposes that competing
and conflicting knowledge systems and ideas would be equally available and affordable if room
were created for multiple channels of accessibility. Such enthusiasm and euphoria, while
understandable, do not adequately account for the prevalent power relations that structure
knowledge production into interconnecting hierarchies at local and global levels.
CODESRIA has some lessons to draw on from its experience of the past 37 years – lessons
about the need to privilege and prioritise recognition and representation of the perspectives,
epistemologies, and contextual and methodological diversity that inform knowledge
production globally and locally; and lessons about the need to widen our understanding and
discussion of ‘open access’ to go beyond just enabling access to knowledge and research
results through a multiplicity of dissemination possibilities. It is important to discuss opening
access up to different races, places, spaces, cultures, classes, generations, disciplines and
fields of study.
This review presents CODESRIA, and its ever-evolving publications and dissemination policy,
as a possible model to inform and inspire institutions interested in a comprehensive idea of
open access in an interconnected world of local and global hierarchies, where producing and
consuming difference is part and parcel of everyday life.
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Citation
Nyamnjoh, F. (2010). Institutional review: Open access and open knowledge production processes: Lessons from CODESRIA. The African Journal of Information and Communication (AJIC), 10, 67-72. https://doi.org/10.23962/10539/19772