Publish in the Global South: A Call for Rebellion
By Alonso Gurmendi.
Back in May last year, I was asked to co-coordinate the 63rd issue of Ius et Veritas, a leading open-access, peer-reviewed, student-led, law journal in Peru. The way things work in Peru, law journals are almost always edited by non-for-profit associations set up by law students. These non-for-profits have strong ties to their universities but are fully independently from them – they have their own means of financing, their own editorial board, and have no official supervision from university faculty or staff. University involvement is usually limited to hosting the journal’s issues in their website.
In the past few years, most of these journals have undergone and continue to undergo efforts to professionalise and attain the highest levels of quality in order to compete in the global academic world. Back in 2007, when I was editor-in-chief of one such journal, Universidad de Lima’s Advocatus, issues were not peer-reviewed, were not open-access, and did not accept English-submissions. Nowadays, all of that has changed. In fact, both Ius et Veritas and Advocatus are now indexed in Latindex, Ibero-America’s main journal indexation system.
Now, why do I bring this up, you may be wondering? Well, because one of the first decisions we made when we started to plan for Ius et Veritas’ newest issue was that we would accept English-language submissions. Ius’ editorial board was thrilled at the possibility. Imagine, being able to get access to original knowledge from all over the world (usually, Peruvian journals will ask for the rights to translate already published foreign language papers to Spanish and re-publish them instead). When the call for papers went out, I retweeded weekly reminders that you could now “publish your work in the Global South and support Global South journals”. Some colleagues showed interest, everyone was extremely supportive – but at the end of the day, except for a Spanish author writing in Spanish, no Global North voices submitted their papers.
Read the full article here: https://opiniojuris.org/2022/01/28/publish-in-the-global-south-a-call-for-rebellion/
Image credit: Students at Catholic University of Peru by world bank is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.