Open Access Publishing and the Democratization of Knowledge: Power, Inequality, and Institutional Change in Global Scholarly Communication

Author: Aida Karimova

Affiliation: Independent Researcher

Summary

People often say that Open Access (OA) publishing is a simple answer to an old problem: research is done for the public good, but many readers can't afford to pay for it. By getting rid of price barriers for readers, OA promises to make scholarly knowledge more available, speed up innovation, and make education more fair. But "democratisation" is more than just opening doors. It also has to do with who gets to make knowledge, whose voices are heard as valid, and how prestige, money, and institutional rules affect academic publishing.

This article looks at open access publishing as a change in how information is shared and as a change in society in the global knowledge economy. We look at how OA increases access while also reproducing some forms of inequality through the lenses of Bourdieu's ideas about field, capital, and symbolic power; world-systems theory's focus on core-periphery inequalities; and institutional isomorphism's explanation of organisational convergence. We demonstrate how article processing charges (APCs), indexing systems, metrics, linguistic hegemony, and platform ownership can transition barriers from "reading" to "publishing." Additionally, we analyse how universities, journals, and funding bodies implement open access (OA) policies through coercive, normative, and mimetic influences, occasionally aligning with equity objectives and at times prioritising reputation management.

Methodologically, the article employs a qualitative conceptual framework augmented by illustrative vignettes and a systematic synthesis of contemporary academic discourses. The findings show that OA makes knowledge more accessible to everyone when it is backed by funding models that include everyone, infrastructure that is run by the community, multilingual practices, clear peer review standards, and evaluation reforms that make it less important to rely on prestige metrics. The conclusion gives institutions and researchers who want OA to do more than just promote openness some useful advice on how to make sure everyone can fairly participate in the production of global knowledge.

Beginning

Access to knowledge has always had an effect on social and economic chances. In higher education, the ability to read current research affects how well teachers teach, how well students learn, and how well communities can come up with new ideas. But for decades, the most common way for scholars to publish their work made it hard for people to get to journals because they had to pay a lot for subscriptions. Many universities with a lot of money could pay, but many schools in poorer areas could not. This made a pattern that was easy to see: the centres of global research had the best access to research, while the margins had less access, even though scholars on the margins were expected to publish and compete internationally.

Open Access publishing came about because of the difference between knowledge as a public good and knowledge as a commercial product. Open access (OA) is a type of publishing where scholarly works are available online for free to anyone who wants to read them. Early declarations and the growth of digital infrastructure helped the idea gain traction. It picked up speed even more when governments and funders started to require publicly funded research to be open to everyone.

The moral story about OA is strong: if research is open, everyone can learn from it. Teachers at universities that don't have a lot of money can read the same books as teachers at top schools. Independent researchers can access scholarly materials without depending on institutional library subscriptions. Students can do more than just read textbooks; they can also do primary research. Doctors, engineers, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and other professionals can use evidence without having to wait for it to be available.

But democratisation isn't just a switch that turns off inequality. Scholarly communication is part of a global system where language, prestige, resources, and institutional power are all important. OA makes it easier for readers to access information, but it can make things harder for authors, especially in APC-based models where the costs of publishing shift from subscribers to researchers. The way journals are indexed, evaluated, and ranked can also strengthen hierarchies. In this regard, OA is not merely an access reform; it represents a contentious transformation of the knowledge domain.

This article examines the assertion of democratisation meticulously. The main question is not "Does OA make access easier?"—most of the time it does. The more important question is: Who gets access, under what conditions, and what do they have to give up? We use three different theoretical frameworks to answer this question:

• Bourdieu elucidates publishing as a competitive domain wherein various forms of capital (economic, cultural, social, symbolic) influence success and legitimacy.

• World-systems theory elucidates the structural dynamics of global academic publishing, characterised by core–periphery relations that centralise resources and recognition in specific regions and institutions.

• Institutional isomorphism elucidates the rationale behind universities and journals implementing analogous open access policies and practices, frequently due to external pressures or through mimicry.

We can see OA as a multi-level phenomenon by putting these lenses together. It is a set of publishing models, a global market, a system of prestige, and a movement of institutional policies.

Theoretical Framework and Background

1) Open Access as a Changing Publishing Landscape

OA is not a single model. There are many ways to get there:

• Gold OA: the journal makes articles available to everyone right away. APCs, sponsorship, or agreements between institutions may provide funding.

• Diamond/Platinum OA: articles are open and authors don't have to pay APCs; institutions, consortia, or community infrastructure pay for the costs.

• Green OA: Authors put their own manuscripts in repositories, sometimes after a set amount of time has passed.

• Hybrid OA: Subscription journals let you choose whether or not to have OA for individual articles, but you usually have to pay for it.

These differences are important. There are many different types of economic and governance structures that "OA" can mean, from community-run journals to big commercial platforms.

2) Bourdieu: Field, Capital, and Symbolic Power

Pierre Bourdieu theorised that society is comprised of "fields"—organized arenas of competition where individuals contend for resources and legitimacy. There are rules, hierarchies, and currencies of value in the field of academic publishing. Researchers vie for acknowledgement, professional progression, and authority, amassing various types of capital:

• Economic capital is money for research, collecting data, and publishing costs.

• Cultural capital includes knowledge, writing skills, training in methods, and credentials.

• Social capital includes connections, partnerships, and mentorship that help you get your work published in good journals and get good reviews.

• Symbolic capital is prestige and reputation, which are often linked to journal brands, citations, and the status of the institution.

OA can change the way these capitals work. For instance, APC-based OA makes economic capital more important for publishing. At the same time, OA can help authors build their symbolic capital by making their work more visible and cited. However, visibility alone does not inherently alter the hierarchy of prestige; symbolic capital continues to be associated with the reputation of journals and institutions.

Bourdieu also talks about symbolic power, which is the ability to say what is real knowledge. In publishing, symbolic power can be seen in things like editorial standards, peer review norms, indexing decisions, and evaluation systems. Open access may make things more open, but if governance and gatekeeping don't change, symbolic power can still stay in elite networks.

3) World-Systems Theory: Knowledge Inequality Between the Core and the Periphery

According to world-systems theory, the global economy is divided into "core" regions (more powerful, industrialised, and resource-rich) and "peripheral" or "semi-peripheral" regions (less powerful and often resource-constrained). When this point of view is applied to higher education and research, it shows that:

• Core countries are home to many high-prestige journals, big publishers, and indexing systems.

• Core priorities are often reflected in research agendas.

• The dominance of English shapes what people around the world can see.

• Scholars in less central locations may encounter more significant challenges, including restricted funding, diminished institutional backing, and reduced access to global networks.

OA can help fix one part of the problem of inequality: access to reading. The world-systems lens, on the other hand, tells us that if core institutions and publishers keep control of costs and governance, OA can create new kinds of global inequalities. If the "right to publish" is based on APCs and connections, then the periphery may be able to read but not write or set the agenda.

4) Institutional Isomorphism: The Reasons Why Organisations Come Together

Institutional isomorphism elucidates the phenomenon of organisations becoming increasingly alike over time, despite encountering diverse contexts. People often talk about three ways that things happen:

• Coercive isomorphism: pressure from funders, governments, or regulators, like OA mandates.

• Normative isomorphism: professional standards and shared norms, such as librarians and research offices advocating for open access best practices.

• Mimetic isomorphism: imitation under uncertainty (e.g., universities copying OA policies from prestigious peers).

These are the ways that OA policies often spread. A university may adopt an OA mandate to comply with funder requirements (coercive), align with emerging professional ethics (normative), or signal modernity and global competitiveness (mimetic). This helps to explain why OA is growing so quickly. But isomorphism also comes with risks. For example, institutions might adopt OA in name only and keep evaluation systems that still put prestige metrics first. Or they might choose the easiest way to comply instead of the fairest model.

Method

This article employs a qualitative conceptual research design featuring a structured analytical synthesis. There are three parts to the method:

• Conceptual mapping of OA models and stakeholder incentives explains how different OA pathways share costs, control, and benefits among authors, readers, institutions, and publishers.

• We use Bourdieu, world-systems theory, and institutional isomorphism to look at OA not just as a technical fix, but also as a change in society and institutions.

• Illustrative vignettes (non-empirical examples) are presented to explain how mechanisms work, including APC barriers, repository mandates, and evaluation pressures.

The aim is not to quantify OA impacts statistically, but to elucidate how democratisation can either succeed or falter based on governance, financing, and evaluation frameworks.

Analysis

1) Democratization Through Reader Access: Real Gains and Hidden Limits

OA’s most visible benefit is straightforward: more people can read more research. This matters in practical ways:

• Faculty in underfunded universities can update curricula with current findings.

• Students can access primary literature for assignments and thesis projects.

• Clinicians and practitioners can consult evidence without relying on institutional subscriptions.

• Policymakers and civil society groups can evaluate research directly.

From a Bourdieu perspective, OA can expand cultural capital by making knowledge resources more widely available. It can also expand social capital by enabling broader participation in scholarly conversations—people can cite, critique, and build on work they can actually read.

However, access to read does not guarantee access to use. Barriers remain:

• Language barriers: most high-visibility research is published in English.

• Technical barriers: poor internet connectivity and limited digital infrastructure.

• Educational barriers: reading academic literature requires training; OA helps but does not replace capacity-building.

• Information overload: open content without guidance can overwhelm readers; discovery tools and indexing shape what is found.

World-systems theory helps explain why these barriers matter. Peripheral settings may gain access to global literature, yet still struggle to translate that access into local knowledge production if infrastructure and training gaps persist. Democratization requires more than open gates; it requires pathways, skills, and supportive institutions.

2) The Shift From Paywalls to “Pay-to-Publish”: APCs and Economic Capital

One of the central tensions in OA is the role of APCs. In APC-based models, the journal is open to readers, but authors (or their funders) pay a fee to publish. This creates a structural shift:

• Subscription model: barriers for readers and libraries.

• APC model: barriers for authors and research teams.

From Bourdieu’s lens, APCs increase the influence of economic capital on publishing outcomes. Well-funded researchers can publish more easily in reputable OA venues. Underfunded researchers may face difficult choices: publish in less visible journals, rely on waivers, or avoid OA options even when OA would increase reach.

This is not a purely financial issue. It affects symbolic capital and career trajectories. If hiring and promotion committees value certain indexed journals, and those journals require APCs, then economic inequality becomes academic inequality. In practice, APCs can:

• Reinforce advantage for elite institutions with strong funding.

• Push scholars from resource-limited contexts toward lower-cost journals, which may be less recognized.

• Encourage strategic behavior: choosing publishing venues based on budgets rather than fit and audience.

Even when publishers offer waiver programs, the experience may be inconsistent, opaque, or stigmatizing. Waivers can help individuals, but they do not always solve the structural problem that “ability to publish” is influenced by “ability to pay.”

3) Prestige, Metrics, and Symbolic Capital: Why Openness Alone Doesn’t Equalize Recognition

OA often increases visibility and potentially citations. Yet the academic field still assigns symbolic capital through prestige hierarchies. Many scholars are evaluated through:

• journal reputation,

• citation-based metrics,

• institutional ranking systems,

• external indexing and evaluation.

Institutional isomorphism helps explain why these metrics remain powerful. Universities imitate the evaluation standards used by high-status institutions. Funding bodies and accreditation processes also rely on standardized indicators because they are easy to compare. Under such pressures, even institutions that support OA may still reward publication in a narrow set of “top” venues.

This creates a contradiction:

• Institutions may promote OA as an ethical commitment.

• Yet they may measure academic “quality” through prestige markers that are not necessarily aligned with openness or equity.

In Bourdieu’s terms, symbolic capital is not distributed fairly; it is historically constructed. OA can widen access to content but still leave the prestige economy unchanged. As a result, democratization may occur primarily at the level of readership, while the level of recognition remains stratified.

4) Governance and Control: Who Owns the Infrastructure of Openness?

OA depends on infrastructure: publishing platforms, repositories, indexing services, data hosting, and long-term archiving. The democratization potential of OA depends heavily on who governs this infrastructure.

If OA is primarily delivered through large commercial platforms, then openness can coexist with concentration of power. In such cases:

• Prices can rise (APCs, service fees, or institutional agreements).

• Data about readership and impact can become proprietary.

• Smaller journals and local publishers may struggle to compete.

• The global South may rely on infrastructure controlled elsewhere.

World-systems theory highlights this as a new form of dependency: peripheral institutions consume open content but remain dependent on core-owned systems for visibility and legitimacy.

In contrast, community-governed and publicly supported infrastructure (repositories, diamond OA platforms, library publishing) can distribute control more widely. This aligns better with democratization because it reduces both access barriers and dependency.

5) Language, Knowledge Agenda, and Epistemic Inequality

Knowledge democratization is not only about access and payment. It also involves whose knowledge counts. Many OA discussions focus on economics but overlook epistemic inequality—unequal recognition of different research topics, methods, and local priorities.

English-language dominance is a major factor. Scholars may be encouraged to publish in English to gain recognition, even when their research serves local audiences better in other languages. Meanwhile, local-language journals may have lower visibility in global indexes, even when they are high quality and socially important.

Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic power is useful here: the ability to define “high-quality scholarship” is linked to the institutions and networks that control peer review standards, editorial boards, and indexing criteria. World-systems theory adds that the “center” often sets norms that become global defaults.

OA can help by making local journals more accessible globally. But if discovery and evaluation systems still privilege English and core institutions, OA alone cannot eliminate epistemic hierarchy.

6) Institutional Isomorphism in OA Adoption: Mandates, Mimicry, and Mixed Motives

Why do institutions adopt OA policies? Often because of:

• funder mandates (coercive),

• professionalization of research management and library services (normative),

• reputation and benchmarking (mimetic).

This can produce rapid diffusion of OA. Yet adoption can be shallow if not supported by aligned practices. Common gaps include:

• A mandate without adequate repository support.

• Encouraging OA while not funding APCs equitably.

• Supporting OA while continuing to evaluate scholars mainly through prestige journals that are expensive.

• Signing institutional OA agreements that benefit already-elite disciplines more than underfunded ones.

Isomorphism can therefore advance OA quickly, but it can also produce “policy compliance” rather than “equity transformation.” A democratizing OA strategy requires intentional design, not only institutional mimicry.

Findings

Based on the theory-driven analysis, several key findings emerge.

Finding 1: OA clearly expands readership, but democratization is partial without capacity and discovery support.

OA increases access to reading, especially for students, practitioners, and institutions without strong library budgets. However, the benefits are uneven if users lack digital infrastructure, language access, training in research literacy, or discovery tools that help them navigate the literature. Democratization requires both open content and supportive systems that make content usable.

Finding 2: APC-based OA can reproduce inequality by shifting barriers from readers to authors.

Where APCs dominate, publishing becomes tied to economic capital. This can disadvantage scholars in underfunded institutions and regions, early-career researchers, and disciplines with less grant funding. Waivers help but are not a full solution. OA democratization is strongest when authors are not excluded by cost.

Finding 3: Prestige systems and evaluation metrics limit the redistributive potential of OA.

Even when OA increases visibility, symbolic capital remains concentrated through reputation hierarchies. Institutions often maintain evaluation systems that reward publication in a narrow set of “high-status” journals, many of which are expensive to publish in or access through institutional agreements. Without reform of research assessment, OA risks becoming an access reform that leaves recognition inequality untouched.

Finding 4: Control over OA infrastructure influences whether openness leads to independence or dependency.

OA delivered through community-governed infrastructure supports democratization by distributing control and reducing dependency on core-owned publishing systems. Conversely, when openness is mediated through concentrated commercial platforms, the system may remain unequal, even if content is free to read.

Finding 5: Democratizing knowledge requires attention to language and epistemic diversity.

OA can help circulate research across borders, but epistemic inequality persists when English dominance and global indexing norms marginalize local journals and locally relevant research agendas. Democratization is stronger when multilingual scholarship and diverse publication venues are respected, indexed, and valued.

Finding 6: OA policies spread through isomorphism, but equity outcomes depend on implementation choices.

Many institutions adopt OA due to external mandates or reputation pressures. This accelerates diffusion but can lead to superficial compliance. Equity-centered OA requires deliberate funding strategies, transparent governance, and evaluation reform.

Conclusion

Open Access publishing has become one of the most significant shifts in scholarly communication in the digital era. Its promise is compelling: knowledge should not be restricted to those who can pay. In many ways, OA has delivered tangible progress. It broadens readership, increases the visibility of research, and enables students, practitioners, and independent scholars to access evidence that once sat behind paywalls.

Yet democratization is not guaranteed by openness alone. The academic publishing field is shaped by power relations, prestige hierarchies, and global inequalities that do not disappear simply because articles become free to read. Using Bourdieu, we see that publishing remains a struggle over capital and legitimacy. Through world-systems theory, we recognize that global academic systems often reproduce core–periphery inequalities, even in open formats. With institutional isomorphism, we understand why OA spreads rapidly while sometimes producing shallow reforms.

For OA to truly democratize knowledge, the system must address both sides of access: access to read and access to publish. It must also reduce dependency by supporting public and community-governed infrastructure. Finally, democratization must include epistemic diversity: multiple languages, multiple research agendas, and fair recognition for scholarship that serves local and regional needs.

Practical Recommendations (Equity-Oriented OA)

1. Expand Diamond OA and community-funded models where authors are not priced out of publishing.

2. Invest in repositories and library publishing as public infrastructure for knowledge.

3. Reform research assessment by reducing overreliance on journal prestige and simplistic metrics.

4. Increase transparency in APC pricing, waiver practices, and editorial governance.

5. Support multilingual publishing and translation practices to broaden real usability and recognition.

6. Build capacity (training, mentoring, digital skills) so open literature becomes genuinely usable.

7. Encourage inclusive governance with editorial boards and reviewers that reflect global diversity.

OA is a powerful tool, but it is not a magic solution. It can democratize knowledge—especially when aligned with fairness in funding, evaluation, and infrastructure. The challenge for the next phase is to ensure that openness becomes not only a distribution model, but a transformation toward more equitable participation in the production and recognition of knowledge.

Hashtags

#OpenAccessPublishing #DemocratizingKnowledge #ScholarlyCommunication #ResearchEquity #AcademicPublishing #KnowledgeEconomy #SciencePolicy

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