Editorial: Going Against the Grain: Our Commitment to Truly Global Labour Studies

This issue of the journal is the last in which Ben Scully participated as an editor.Ben has played an extremely important role in the journal's life over the past eight years and has contributed to maintaining the academic quality of the journal, through his meticulous yet constructive approach to papers under review.Ben has also been a key facilitator in the editorial board, managing the important changes the journal has gone through in the past year.We wanted to thank Ben for leading us into the "adulthood" of managing the Global Labour Journal with his characteristic smoothness and calmness.We are committed, as a board, to building on the crucial work of our predecessors and to growing the journal's quality and outreach.Ben leaving the editorial board marks the beginning of a new challenging period for the current editorial board.The academic publishing environment is undergoing further commodification of knowledge production.As academics, we write and review papers and steer and coordinate editorial boards often for free.Universities pay us for our research work and then pay publishers for accessing journal articles whose content publishers receive basically as a gift, without paying for it.Recent implementation of open access policy by funding institutions, such as the one adopted by the European Union for all its funded research, has made work that was previously accessible only through individual or institutional subscriptions open to anyone.This is in itself very positive, especially for scholars across the Global South, whose institutions have limited resources to pay for accessing expensive journal databases.However, publishers' imposition on authors of so called 'golden' or 'green' paid routes for making the publication open access is creating an absurd situation in which you as author have to first grant copyright to journal publishers and then have to pay them to get back your freedom -paying for what it is yours, an oxymoron that is somehow legitimate within the market logic.Payment for open access is also creating new forms of academic colonialism and discrimination between authors in core countries, whose work is read and cited because they can pay for it to be open access, and those in peripheral countries, whose work remains inaccessible and thus less relevant in terms of ranking systems.This situation is not just unfair for authors (often published in the same journal or participating in international debates side by side, one visible and the other invisible) but it also creates hierarchies in terms of which part of the world creates knowledge and, in turn, how this knowledge is recognized by scholarly communities worldwide.This, added to the predominance of English as the global working and research language, produces a double, though contradictory, side effect in the social sciences: it makes entire lines of research and epistemology from the South disappear while opening the doors to sectarian, supposedly anticolonial, niches that do not allow the regeneration of science in these regions.

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