Open Access, African Scholarly Publishing, and Cultural Rights: An Exploratory Usage and Accessibility Study, Natalia Taylor Poppeliers

For much of the previous century, it was rare for individuals outside of the library and information science field to view information work within a context of social justice, democratization or human rights despite the long standing public awareness that journalism, another information field, holds a key place in these areas. However, there has been a shift in this first decade of the 21st century. Individuals and organizations across the globe not normally associated with the library and information science world are recognizing the need for access to information if local and global social inequalities are to be redressed. As a result, librarians and information workers in both industrialized and less-industrialized nations have new opportunities for increasing the significance of information work for achieving fundamental human rights. Similarly, the Open Access (OA) Movement has been praised by proponents as a way to reverse the unsustainability of traditional scholarly publishing economic models and to aid in the equalization of the flow of information between industrialized and less industrialized nations. The OA Movement is thus also seen as a means of helping achieve fundamental human rights as presented in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). When examining the place of information in the human rights framework, most focus on Article 19 of the UDHR and the corresponding Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) which codifies it: