The Colonial Flow of Open Access

Open Access started as a movement to allow the free and broad distribution of scientific outputs. However, after the flip from print to online journals, OA was adapted by big publishers into a high-profit business model. This research-in-progress has two questions: How does the scholarly publishing increase of Global South authors relate to the publishers from the region where they are? How does the scholarly publishing increase of Global South authors relate to the academic legitimacy of these authors in the Information Systems (IS) area? To answer, the paper provides a comparative quantitative analysis with data from the OpenAlex platform, of two dimensions of OA scholarly publishing: the flow of articles and resources from authors in the Global South to the Global North publishers. We assume these flows represent academic colonialism, reinforcing disparities and inequalities powered by OA business models.