An earlier version of this article first appeared in Funding Insight in summer 2017; this updated version is reproduced with kind permission of Research Professional. For more articles like this, visit www.researchprofessional.com.

We are all familiar with the structural faultlines of inequality that exist around attributes such as age, ethnicity, and gender. These faultlines act, and sometimes interact, to create barriers to academic publication. For example, Michael Eisen, a US biologist, found in 2016 that, in US-funded health research, less than 30% of senior academic authors are women. He also found that male authors write with fewer female co-writers (35%) than female authors do (45%). Leaving aside the whole ethical problem with treating gender as binary, this demonstrates an interaction between gender and publishing that disadvantages women.

So far, so straightforward. While of course institutionalised sexism needs to be addressed, it is hardly news these days, and there are legislative and policy structures designed to assist. A more unusual take is to look at the structural faultlines of inequality that exist around institutions and managerial practices, which are not currently addressed by equalities legislation or policy. These faultlines, too, act and interact to prevent people from publishing academic work. And by ‘people’ I mean academics, independent scholars, and Indigenous researchers.

Many academics of my acquaintance want their research to change minds and hearts and lives. They long for wide exposure, which often means publishing in open access (OA) journals. However, in many fields, the impact factors of OA journals are not high enough to satisfy audit requirements. So academics have to settle for publication in paywalled journals, read primarily by other academics.

With the growth of OA publishing, some OA journals are now reaching the dizzy heights of audit-worthy impact factors. But then there is another barrier. Access to these journals is open to all readers, but only to those writers with enough money – or an institutional budget – to pay the article processing charges (APCs). This can exclude many junior academics, whose senior colleagues get first dibs on the budget, and most independent scholars (though, to be fair, some OA journals do waive part or all of their APCs for indies).

Being outside an institution can cause barriers to publication in unexpected places. Take the reputable online publication The Conversation, whose strapline is ‘Academic rigour, journalistic flair’. The Conversation covers virtually all disciplines and has a lofty ‘charter‘ which claims to ‘support and foster academic freedom to conduct research, teach, write and publish.’ The charter speaks of freedom from bias, and operation for the public good. Yet the author information states that ‘you must be a member of an academic or research institution to write for The Conversation’. So academics who are between jobs, or independent scholars who prefer to work free from institutional biases and constraints, or retired scholars who have plenty more to say, have no voice within this so-called ‘academic freedom’.

Perhaps the biggest exclusion affects Indigenous researchers and those from the global South. In her 2012 book Indigenous Research Methods, Professor Bagele Chilisa of Botswana noted that Indigenous researchers find it almost impossible to publish their work through Euro-Western publishing systems (p. 55). Some organisations are working to counteract this, such as the international research development charity INASP, whose Journals Online Project currently covers work from Africa, Latin America, the Philippines, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Mongolia, Nepal and Sri Lanka. (More info here.)

However, it is notable that most of the action to increase authors’ access to scholarly publishing comes from outside academia. The much-vaunted ‘public engagement agenda’ doesn’t seem to consider that some of the public might like to engage, not only as passive consumers of lectures, but also as active authors of scholarly work. Until all of these inequalities are systematically and effectively tackled, academic publishing will continue to represent privileged voices alone.