Recently, my team had to respond to a reviewer that we lacked the resources to respond to a request for adding data to a paper.
Despite the analysis working, the reviewer wanted us to add a few years to the analysis. To do so, we would have to make a five figure data purchase.
My request for money went unanswered - I understand why - it’s a lot for one paper!
So we wrote: ‘we are embarrassed to admit that we do not have the money needed to purchase the requested data.’
We are hoping the journal editor and reviewer will respect the effort we put into the revision & that the academic landscape does not afford equal access to data to all authors.
We just don’t know.
Writing an apology because we lacked resources made me pause - and think about the many faculty who suffer from resource issues.
Given I work at a relatively well-resourced school in the Global North, it pained me to think about the access that scholars in the Global South have to data, articles, and infrastructure necessary to participate in the international academic community.
I took some time to scroll through the indexes of some journals in my field & many studies that I could not imagine conducting on a shoestring budget.
It broke me.
The playing field simply isn’t level.
Since I started in my academic life, we have made strides towards offering better access to scholars who want to participate in academic communities.
Key changes include:
- online access to articles
- open source publications
- open source statistical packages
- learning resources for research methods
But even these changes haven’t leveled the world up.
Faculty from the Global South and who serve at less wealthy schools in the Global North face substantial challenges if they want to participate in the international discourse.
Often they lack access to:
- articles that sit behind firewalls
- data sources that charge exorbitant sums
- software packages or training on research methods
- conferences and conference proceedings
And more.
The Global North seems happy to offer the Global South to what is easy - what we have already done - but we seem to be incapable of sharing resources needs to offer equal access to participation to all scholars who want it.
More than that, the Global North seems to reluctant to value the scholarship most pertinent to the Global South - as defined by scholars from those countries.
In fact, I’ve yet to see a major conference panel in my field where scholars from the global south are afforded opportunities to educate the Global North on what they find interesting & why. If there was one, I missed it.
I lack solutions, these are deep community issues tied to class, caste, and wealth.
I do know that we need an inclusive discourse about what it means to have equal access in each discipline if we are going to knit a truly global academic community.
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