What we know about the academic journal landscape reflects global inequalities

Over the past sixty years, there has been an exponential growth in the global scholarly publishing landscape. Mapping or capturing it, however, is a difficult task as dominant databases only cover a small proportion of published journals. Kirsten Bell and David Mills offer their own cartographic visualisation of the global scholarly publishing landscape. They argue that the little that is known about scholarly production outside the English-speaking world is revealing about the inequalities of dominant knowledge practices. Moreover, what we do know- the characterisations of non-Western publishers as ‘predatory’- is a conceit which reaffirms colonial hierarchies. They urge readers to explore whole ‘unknown’ publishing continents: non-indexed publications, non-English journals, and non-mainstream journals.