| Summary: | Seen from Francophone Sub-Saharian Africa, the struggle for open access takes on a meaning different from that which prevails in the countries of the global North. The detour proposed in this article aims at uncovering issues that are often invisible in the debates around open access, in particular the mechanisms of exclusion set up by the world-system of scientific publication, dominated by the Anglo-Saxon mercantile model. We will show that a concept of open access, which is limited to the legal and technical questions of the accessibility of science without considering the relations between the center and the periphery, can become a source of epistemic alienation and neo-colonialism in the global South. On the other hand, if we integrate the concern for the development of the knowledge produced in the periphery and the awareness of all that hinders the creation of this knowledge, open access can become a tool of cognitive justice in service to the construction of an inclusive universalism associated to fair open science.
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