This Special Issue of Information Matters on Information Privilege and the Cultures of Scholarly Communication centers notions and experiences on information privilege. Perspectives come from a variety of contributors including scholars, information professionals, and academics, where they articulate what information privilege is in a number of ways.
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One of the most important lessons I have ever learned about information access did not come from a classroom. It came from my grandmother, Priscilla Perkins.
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Taylor Swift is often described as one of the smartest business strategists in entertainment. From a sold-out and record-breaking global tour, she has become a case study in brand control, platform power, and audience loyalty. So, I used her as an example in my class at a private Canadian university. And almost no one knew who she was.
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Information privilege helps us see how access and visibility shape what becomes credible, legitimate, and shareable knowledge. It refers not only to unequal access to information, often structured by institutional affiliation, education, class, or social position, but also to unequal access to the means of making experience intelligible. In scholarly communication, this usually appears through paywalls, subscriptions, databases, and prestige economies. Yet information privilege also operates through language. As discussions from the Association of College & Research Libraries have suggested, access to information is inseparable from access to the systems that authorize what counts as legitimate knowledge.
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For decades, English has been a lingua franca in the research community, where it has become the principal language for publishing and conferences. But when one main language is used to share information, knowledge of this language is also needed to access information. In this way, English has become linked to information privilege: people who have mastered English can access scholarly information more easily than people who are less comfortable in this language. This has ripple effects, influencing the extent to which scientists can participate fully in scholarly communication. While the problems are clear, the solutions are trickier.
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The systems, tools, and practices developed by Big Tech and academic publishers that we use daily in our personal and professional lives have created inequitable and unjust information environments and societies. This is due to the concentrated power, extreme wealth, and influence in the hands of the few.
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“Transgender” is no longer a foreign word in the Philippines, nor are transgender Filipinos allowing discrimination to hold them back. Though LGBTQIA+ minority groups in the Philippines are still seen as “deviant, immoral, or even illegal” by the wider population, transgender Filipinos do not let that stop them from thriving. Instead of relying on traditional sources of information and risking intolerance from Filipino society, they create, recreate, and distribute information they’ve made themselves for both education and community solidarity.
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As a librarian (occasionally practicing) and a practicing physician, I often encounter workplace issues that would be better resolved with a little perspective from the information field. Problems, such as the need to search for reliable information in order to treat a particularly challenging medical case, are commonplace. This can be a frustrating but fascinating experience, as I, being an information professional, have some intrinsic knowledge of the issues that make solving these problems a challenge.
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Have you ever shared your personal story with someone—only to never hear what happened to it afterward? This happens more often than we realize in academic research. Communities open their homes, share their experiences, and give researchers hours of interviews and photographs. Later, the research appears in journals, conferences, and university libraries. But the people whose lives shaped that research may never see the final results. Why? Because academic knowledge often circulates within privileged spaces—behind paywalls, in English, and through technical language.
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The rising cost of textbooks can lead university students to make tough decisions, such as buying a cheaper, outdated version, sharing a single copy among a group, making an illegal copy, or going without a textbook altogether. Each of these coping strategies can negatively impact a student’s learning. Thankfully, open educational resources (OER) are emerging as a means of combatting information privilege that is linked to finances. This is a positive step forward, but is it enough? How else can we leverage the potential of OER to reduce other types of information privilege?
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