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The whiteness of capitalist publishing models: Decolonizing conversations must interrogate the economics of publishing


 

As an editor of a major communication journal that is committed to praxis, I have been reflecting on what the practical politics of publishing looks like even as our disciplinary associations pronounce our commitments to diversity, inclusion, and decolonization.

How far can we decolonize when our publishing models are based on, held up by, and dependent on the publishing infrastructure of large publishing transnational corporations? 

Almost all of these large publishing transnational corporations are based in Europe/America, rooted in colonial logics of extraction.

The colonial logic underpinning these publishing corporations is evident in the fundamental logic of profiteering that shapes academic publishing. 

Journals are set up as platforms to publish scholarship, built as infrastructures to generate revenues for transnational publishing corporations.

From editors to editorial review board members to reviewers, an entire chain of unpaid or poorly paid academic labour holds up the journal infrastructure. 

As academics, we are trained into counting this work of peer reviewing as integral to our academic identities. We must perform this unpaid labour as a service to the profession. 

The countless hours of work reviewing manuscripts, editing them, and dialoguing with authors through the peer review process are unpaid, based on the expectation that this is part of the academic job.

Yet, the mechanics of the publishing process and the economic logic of the publishing platforms are entirely opaque to us. 

I am struck by how often colleagues have no idea about the revenue streams and revenues generated from journals. 

For instance, what is the actual revenue generated by a journal? What percentage of this is profit? How much of the profit is retained by the publisher? How much of the profit is distributed to the association? How is the revenue, if any, distributed to the association, put to use?

These questions largely remain unanswered, with a publishing framework that is largely opaque to academics.

With the increasing and rapid globalization of publishing, much of the actual labour in the publishing process is shipped out to knowledge process outsourcing centres in the Global South. 

Knowledge labourers in the Global South perform the various tasks of managing the platform, from coordinating the flow of manuscripts to copy-editing the manuscripts, often at poorly paid wages. 

This process of academic production then reproduces an extractive colonial economy where the Global South is exploited for cheap labour. 

The irony then is striking that even as we publish articles on decolonizing our journals, we do so to reproduce a predatory model that exploits cheap labour from the Global South. 

The irony of the whiteness of diversity and inclusion in journal publishing lies in its incorporation of decolonization talk to create and reproduce the whiteness of the capitalist publishing model that largely profits white, western capital.

Serious decolonization work therefore must agitate to undo this predatory model of journal publishing.


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