Libraries have a crucial role to play in advancing social justice and equity in the creation and sharing of knowledge. The University of Cape Town Libraries show us one path forward.
The scholarly communication system currently subjects researchers, students, and individuals—particularly those in the Global South—to restricted access due to paywalls and systemic barriers like power imbalances and underrepresentation (Shimabukuro, 2025; Fatima, 2025). These obstacles significantly worsen the existing divide in how research is produced and shared, which favors Global North and Western perspectives and standards, undermining knowledge equity and marginalizing diverse ways of knowing.
Operating from the premise that knowledge is a public good, libraries can play a critical role in advancing social justice and equity in the creation and sharing of knowledge. In this article, I’ll critically examine this role, highlighting the University of Cape Town (UCT) Libraries’ effort to promote equity in knowledge production and dissemination through the African Platform for Open Scholarship.
While social justice aligns with the fundamental principles of librarianship, the relationship between libraries and social justice is threatened by economic pressures, technological inequalities, political interference, and systemic biases. Still, amid disruptive technologies and the commercialization of knowledge, libraries have strengthened communities by promoting social justice and equity. Recent open access (OA) initiatives, primarily from the Global South, have underscored the role of libraries in promoting social justice and supporting the view of knowledge as a public resource rather than a private asset. These initiatives include diamond open access and its summit, SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online), Redalyc, and the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLASCO), to name a few.
The principle that access to knowledge is a human right is formally recognized in documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Toluca-Cape Town Declaration on Diamond Open Access. Their primary shared objective is social equality: the broad philosophical and political goal of creating a just and equitable society. This includes ensuring fair distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges and actively working to remove systemic oppression, discrimination, and injustice.
This conception of knowledge underpins the OA movement: if knowledge itself is a public good, then scientific and scholarly content should be freely available to all.
As new and emerging technologies make it possible to fully realize this vision, we need to develop a shared understanding of exactly what it means to treat knowledge as a public good. A pure public good is perfectly non-rival in consumption—meaning, in this case, that one individual’s consumption of knowledge does not affect another’s opportunity to consume it. It is also non-excludable, meaning that individuals cannot deny each other the opportunity to consume knowledge. By contrast, the traditional subscription model of scholarly publishing, and even some article processing charge (APC) OA models, turn knowledge into a private good. Diamond OA seeks to address these challenges.
This year’s OA week theme—“Who owns our knowledge?”— posed an important and related question: how, during a period of upheaval, can communities reclaim authority over the knowledge they generate, and, in particular, how can libraries within research institutions regain authority over the knowledge generated by their users, community, and other stakeholders?
Social justice seeks to remedy systemic disparities by guaranteeing equitable access to resources, opportunities, and information. If social justice is the goal, then equity is the strategy used to achieve it. Equity recognizes that people have different starting points and backgrounds, making a one-size-fits-all approach ineffective. Genuine equity involves providing customized resources and support designed to meet the specific needs of individuals and communities, ultimately ensuring everyone has a fair chance to thrive.
Because libraries are at the center of knowledge dissemination and access, they must go beyond their traditional roles of managing and preserving information with little influence over the underlying knowledge systems to make equity a focus of the library and information science discourse.
Many libraries embody social justice by providing free, universal access to knowledge for everyone, regardless of their socioeconomic status, education level, or background. Libraries advance equity by pushing back against the commodification of knowledge and by addressing inequalities in knowledge access, including those stemming from the digital divide and paywalls.
Before we explore how libraries create equitable access to knowledge, we must first understand and critique how these knowledge systems are built and for whom. While the global discussion on equitable knowledge access is recent for some, it has long been central to discourse in the Global South. This discourse highlights several key lessons: knowledge creation must acknowledge diverse ways of knowing and methodologies, actively incorporate indigenous knowledge systems, and be decoupled from publication channels largely controlled by the Global North.
In 2021, to advance social justice and equity in knowledge sharing, the University of Cape Town (South Africa) launched the African Platform for Open Scholarship (APOS), a diamond OA publishing platform. APOS allows the African research community to control and share its own scholarly output, a critical strategy for increasing the visibility of marginalized research, and leverages shared infrastructure and resources to support sustainable and equitable scholarly communication that advances social justice goals.
The APOS currently hosts around 30 journal titles covering subjects from African inter/multidisciplinary studies, engineering education, and pediatrics, to business and management, enabling the five participating countries to make their local knowledge discoverable and freely accessible. It uses a multi-tenant platform, allowing institutions to retain their branding. Through this approach, and in partnership with the Association of African Universities, APOS brings publishing for African scholars back to the academy.
The platform is hosted and fully managed by UCT Libraries with technical support from UCT’s Information and Communication Technology Services department. Moreover, UCT Libraries provides training for scholarly communication personnel (from librarians to journal editors) who are involved in these journals or planning to host journals on the platform. APOS builds capacity by providing free, inclusive, and community-led scholarly publishing across African universities.
Like other diamond OA initiatives, APOS must grapple with the challenge of long-term sustainability and leadership commitment. One particular complexity has been managing the hosted infrastructure in collaboration with the participating institutions’ technology teams, which have competing responsibilities.
Despite these obstacles, the platform provides a robust alternative to the “publish globally and perish locally” dilemma. It successfully hosts African-centric research and supports social justice principles by removing barriers to research dissemination. Through APOS, UCT Libraries and the Association of African Universities foster collaboration and enhance the visibility and impact of African research, thereby advancing knowledge as a common good and contributing to the decolonization of knowledge.
At the 2nd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access, we gathered under an image of the Baobab tree, an apt symbol for diamond open access. An icon of the African continent, the baobab, known as the “Tree of Life,” can store thousands of liters of water in its trunk and regenerate after it is damaged, allowing it to thrive in arid climates. Its fruit is rich in nutrients, and its bark and leaves are useful for medicine and food. Baobab trees can live for over 1,000 years, making them witnesses to generations of history.
Libraries have also endured through thousands of years, from the ancient libraries of Mesopotamia and the Library of Alexandria, to monastic and early community libraries in the medieval period, to early modern and modern libraries, like the Bodleian Library (Oxford), the Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), and the British Museum Library, founded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From the clay tablet to papyrus to the book and, now, digital formats, libraries have thrived through various innovations and in the face of their own harsh climate: funding reduction and cuts, the rising cost of e-journals, and transformative agreements.
Like the baobab sustains life, libraries sustain community knowledge across generations, preserving equitable access to knowledge as scholarly communication systems develop and evolve. We must continue to support alternative publishing methods, like APOS, and, in the face of skyrocketing subscription prices and APCs, provide infrastructure for knowledge dissemination.
In African culture, as in many indigenous communities, trees are a point of gathering and unity. Storytelling sessions in the shade of the tree ensure that collective memory is passed on, undistorted, to future generations. Likewise, libraries have helped to decolonize knowledge, a role they should extend by curating collections that reflect diverse, local, and Indigenous voices; by rethinking classification systems and metadata; by supporting open access and community archives; and by supporting reform in research assessment. Librarians and libraries should be advocates for intellectual freedom and equity in education. They should influence policies on open science, research evaluation, and assessment to advance social justice and equitable access within the open access movement.
As stated in the Toluca–Cape Town Declaration on Diamond Open Access, sharing knowledge is a human right; as such, scholarly knowledge must be a public good, accessible to all communities, including readers and authors, without barriers and paywalls. Libraries face significant challenges. But the role they play in ensuring knowledge equity and a fairer society is crucial. Like the deeply rooted baobab, they must now tap into their strength in the face of adversity and intentionally commit to providing equitable and barrier-free access to knowledge for all.
Fatima, A. (2024). The impact of paywalls on global research equity. EditorsCafe. https://editorscafe.org/details.php?id=65#:~:text=A%20single%20journal%20article%20can,universities%20in%20the%20Global%20South
Shimabukuro, J. (2025). Smashing paywalls to the latest research. ETC Journal. https://etcjournal.com/2025/08/19/smashing-paywalls-to-the-latest-research/#:~:text=Barriers%20for%20Authors%3A%20Many%20open,This%20creates%20new%20inequities
10.1146/katina-121625-1
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