This #COVID19 crisis is once again showing us how important it is to democratize & diversify the editorial boards of “top” scholarly journals.

The African continent has been battling outbreaks of infectious diseases for a very longtime now but *deep learnings* from these experiences hardly find their way onto the pages of the most prestigious & widely disseminated scholarly outlets...

...because undiversified editorial boards keep telling us that this work is not “interesting enough for the wider scientific community” (read: not interesting enough for us Americans and Europeans). Consequently these crucial lessons are lost.

No single group of people has monopoly on knowledge and wisdom. But our friends in the north have for a very long time now acted as if they and only they were the reservoirs and arbiters of knowledge and wisdom.

And I am tired of the response: "But these are "their" journals so they are free to do with them as they please".

That's correct except that what is published in these journals has far ranging (policy) impact beyond the borders of the countries that house the journals.

In econ speak, these journals impose huge externalities on the world. If some of these externalities are negative (for example in biases against useful southern knowledge), then these are grounds to do something about it.