Authors : Tom Olyhoek, Barbara Porrett, Dominic Mitchell
Global scientific publishing, including open access publishing, is heavily biased towards journals and authors from the Global North. This has resulted in a knowledge gap between the South and the North. It has led to a situation where scientific knowledge from the Global South is very much underrepresented in the collective scientific output worldwide: a problem which has been described as cognitive injustice.
Unfortunately this situation is not helped by the fact that many questionable publishers are based in countries in the Global South. To address these issues the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) started an Ambassador programme in 2016 with the help of funding from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC Canada).
The main objective of the programme was to increase the number of quality open access journals published, and the quality of open access publishing, in the Global South.