Scholarly Publishing in the Third World

THECREATION AND DISSEMINATION of knowledge is a complex process in any society, and is particularly difficult in the Third World, where the economic, intellectual, and institutional structures of the scientific community are not well established. This article1 focuses on the dissemination of knowledge in the Third World. The article is predicated on the idea that knowledge dissemination is especially important in the Third World context, since the emergence of an independent intellectual life and some self-sufficiency in the scientific realm depend in part on building the structures for knowledge dissemination. Traditionally, the principal means of dissemination are scholarly journals and publishers of books and related materials. Focus will be mainly on one element of this equation, i.e. scholarly publishing and especially university publishing, since this is seen as a key to supplying the needs of Third World nations. This discussion begins with the special problems facing the Third World in terms of scholarly publishing and then discusses the possible roles of the university press in this context. Given the paucity of data on this topic, the discussion is necessarily somewhat general and is aimed both at analyzing some current problems and at stimulating thought concerning one creative means of fulfilling an urgent building block in the structure of intellectual development. This article focuses largely on universities in the process of creation and dissemination of knowledge, and special attention is paid to the university press as a means of communication. While universities do not have a monopoly on either creation or distribution of knowledge, they are, especially in the Third World, the key institutions in this process. They house the large share of creative scholars, sponsor most functioning re-