The Ethics of Indigenous Knowledge Ownership and Access in Scholarly Publishing

Indigenous Knowledge (IK) is a universal practice rooted in individuals in which authors document oral and written beliefs, innovations, and practices to promote responsible and sustainable stewardship of cultural and natural resources. Authors create knowledge artifacts (books, articles, lectures, media, etc.) to manifest and share this knowledge. Publishers are morally and legally vested with the responsibility to assist authors in documenting and preserving IK. In the current scholarly publishing process, part of the ownership of knowledge transfers to publishers once it is codified through publication. Publishers are recurrently paid Author Publication Charges (APCs) or subscription fees from libraries and individuals in need of access to these resources. While copyright licenses detail the rights for publication, distribution, and use of research between authors and publishers, the interests of the authors are not always well protected, thus creating a conflict of knowledge ownership. These legal agreements commonly restrict resharing the research elsewhere after publication, discouraging prospective knowledge management practices and creating difficulties in the future. There is a need to renew the moral contract between authors of IK and publishers that is built on ethical constructs of trust, fairness, and justice, which may in turn lead to effective knowledge management practices. To better understand these ethical issues, IK is explored in articles published in North America, in policy and access in China, and in an interview with a Professor of Archives and Records Management based in Nigeria. It is determined that the publishing industry must review the current approaches to IK ownership and access by creating a special copyright for IK in which the author retains ownership and reconsidering OA funding to ensure equity.