Epistemic Alienation in African Scholarly Communications: Open Access as a Pharmakon

Abstract

Twenty years into the twenty-first century, it must regrettably be admitted that open access (OA) has not fulfilled the lofty ambitions set out in the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) in 2002.Instead of reducing publication costs, accelerating the dissemination of scientific information, ensuring the visibility of scientific publications, and promoting barrier-free access to scientific information, OA now often seems to reinforce and to create new inequalities.As Ulrich Herb has noted:Open access has changed.At the beginning of the millennium, it was portrayed in a romanticising way and was embedded in a conceptual ensemble of participation, democratisation, digital commons and equality.Nowadays, open access seems to be exclusive: to the extent that commercial players have discovered it as a business model and article fees have become a defining feature of gold open access, open access has increasingly transformed into a distinguishing feature and an exclusive element.… Open access is increasingly becoming an instrument that creates exclusivity, exclusion, distinction and prestige.These functions, however, are obscured by symbolic gift giving strategies and presented as altruistically staged, so that in the discourse of the open access community and in media reporting on open access, the both euphemistic and largely obsolete prosocial story-telling of open access dominates.1 Regarding these unmet OA promises, it is important to think about their consequences in the context of the African continent.It is such thinking that is the aim of this chapter-in which, drawing on postcolonial theory, I will examine OA through the lens of the pharmakon.The term pharmakon comes from the Greek word pharmakos (φάρμακον), which refers to a purification ritual that took place in ancient Greece.During this rite, criminals were expelled from the city to purge the polis of the evil that affected it.2 It may seem ambiguous, but from this ritual, the (criminal) evil is still used to heal the city.In his essay on Plato's Pharmacy, and in a more recent context, Epistemic Alienation in African

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