European Science Editing 47: e67829, doi: 10.3897/ese.2021.e67829
Rethinking the use of the term ‘Global South’ in academic publishing
Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva‡‡ Independent researcher, Miki-cho, Japan
Corresponding author: Jaime Teixeira da Silva ( jaimetex@yahoo.com ) Academic editor: Hrvoje Jakovac © Jaime Teixeira da Silva. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citation:
Teixeira da Silva JA (2021) Rethinking the use of the term “Global South” in academic publishing. European Science Editing 47: e67829. https://doi.org/10.3897/ese.2021.e67829 |  |
Abstract
‘Global South’, a term frequently used on websites and in papers related to academic and ‘predatory’ publishing, may represent a form of unscholarly discrimination. Arguments are put forward as to why the current use of this term is geographically meaningless, since it implies countries in the southern hemisphere, whereas many of the entities in publishing that are referred to as being part of the Global South are in fact either on the equator or in the northern hemisphere. Therefore, academics, in writing about academic publishing, should cease using this broad, culturally insensitive, and geographically inaccurate term.
Keywords
cultural insensitivity, discrimination, Global South, mass mentality, open access