European Science Editing 50: e124173, doi: 10.3897/ese.2024.e124173
Article processing charges suppress the scholarship of doctoral students
Joshua Wang‡‡ Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
Corresponding author: Joshua Wang ( reillyjj@qut.edu.au ) Academic editor: Dado Čakalo © Joshua Wang. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citation:
Wang J (2024) Article processing charges suppress the scholarship of doctoral students. European Science Editing 50: e124173. https://doi.org/10.3897/ese.2024.e124173 |  |
Abstract
The open access movement has drastically reconfigured the financial burdens of scholarly publishing. Yet, the influence of a marketized scholarly publishing system on doctoral education remains unexplored. I reflect on my own PhD candidature to illustrate how article processing charges disempower doctoral candidates. I argue that the current open access publishing model unfairly advantages candidates with personal, familial and/or institutional wealth. The inequalities imposed on doctoral students by our sectors’ current publishing habits ultimately bias who will be paid to produce and safeguard knowledge in the future. Doctoral students can no longer be ignored in debates over open access publishing.
Keywords
Article processing charge, doctoral education, open access, scholarly publishing, transformative open access agreement