Peripheral scholarly journals: From locality to globality

Abstract

This critical literature review examines the problems faced by scholarly
peripheral journals. Two categories of problems were identified. The first one
refers to the deleterious effect the “publish-or-perish” mantra has on those
journals, such as publication drain and the conduction of research that appeals
to an international audience. The second category consists in problems that are
related to the context in which these journals are published: lack of funds to run
the journals, lack of competent editors and reviewers, problems related to
publication ethics, endogamy, etc. The solution to overcome such problems is
not to publish more and more journals in peripheral countries – which has been
the tendency for the last ten years or so – but to upgrade local journals to global
ones that should be published online in order to attract high-quality papers from
both national and foreign authors. This would strengthen and enhance these
journals visibility and international indexing. It would also increase the global
influence of the research conducted in peripheral countries and bring global
awareness to the specific scientific, social, cultural and economic features
prevailing in such contexts.