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PUBLISHED: 30 July 2018 Knowledge from the Global South, and particularly Africa, is continuously exported and repackaged, thereby transferring its ownership to those able to conform it to the paradigms of consumption in the knowledge economy of the Global North. The list of the top 40 scientific papers by country, according to Scopus, reflects a significant under-representation of publications from Africa. It is significant to note that only one African country – South Africa – features on the list, but only in the bottom five journals.1 This exclusion may be for many reasons, not withstanding those related to funding and government support, the developmental needs of universities, a lack of ability on the part of the authors themselves to write to Western paradigms and standards, and the career aspirations and needs of African academics. Yet we propose that these issues are not the only reasons for the lack of academic voice from the African continent – there is a substantial amount of research on inequality in global knowledge production which largely focuses on income and resource inequality as the major reason for this situation.2-4 It is, however, arguable that focusing only on the technical and economic limitations of African academics, whilst ignoring the greater cultural and political context within which the practice of academia is in itself deeply entrenched, does not sufficiently account for the challenges that they face. However, a significant cause of academic silence is the consequence of barriers resulting from practices of ‘the old boys’ network’. Thus, focusing on the global publication practices in academia, we present fresh arguments to bring to centre stage the consequence of barriers resulting from these networks. Here, the relative socio-political challenges of African academics are critically interwoven into the understanding and functioning of the informal old boys’ network.

Owning the lake, not just the rod: The continuing challenge of ‘the old boys’ in knowledge production