Erica Yu, Postdoctoral researcher, Philosophy, Tilburg University

Once I saw how unjust and exploitative commercial academic publishing is, my priorities and decisions as a researcher shifted towards supporting Diamond Open Access as much as I possibly can. It’s the only way I’m sure that the knowledge that I’m producing is truly open, and that it is published in the service of the scholarly community and society as a whole.

I remember as an undergraduate student in the Philippines, my university did not have access to many of the articles that were relevant for my research. That changed drastically when I started my Research Master’s in the Netherlands. My friends from back home started asking me for papers they would not have access to but I did. I found it unbelievable that papers about regional economic development in the Philippines were available for students in the Netherlands, but not in the Philippines.

As a researcher in the Netherlands, I started working for the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics—which was free to read and free to publish in. I wasn’t really too familiar with the concept of Diamond Open Access then. But what I experienced then was the difficulty that comes with running a grassroots initiative run by volunteers and reliant on external funding.

Then I became an open access officer at the university library. That’s where I saw the big picture: public funds being siphoned straight into the pockets of big publishers, supported by the free labor of researchers. At the same time, Diamond Open Access initiatives are left to struggle with limited funding and support. This was the only time when everything clicked for me: the system was broken, and it entailed coordinated action from the academic community as a whole. 

Now that I’m a postdoc researcher, I’m committed to advocating for Diamond Open Access, publishing and reviewing for Diamond Open Access journals, and doing research on democratizing scholarly publishing. 

What I want to say is this: When you start looking around, you see just how much needs to be done, but also you see how much power we can take back together as the academic community.