This article is based on reflections from Charleston Conference Asia, attended by Claire Hao, Associate of Research Consulting and founder of Every Author Hong Kong. Claire works closely with Research Consulting on research support, publishing strategy, and early-career researcher development across Asia.
Held in Bangkok for the first time, Charleston Conference Asia marked a significant moment for the scholarly communications community. More than a regional extension of a long-established global meeting, the conference surfaced how global knowledge systems are being reshaped when viewed from Asian institutional, linguistic, and economic realities.
Across keynotes, panels, and case-based sessions, discussions converged around a shared question: how can scholarly communication systems designed under conditions of abundance adapt to regions characterised by rapid research growth, uneven capacity, and structural inequity?
- Knowledge Equity as a System Design Problem, Not a Policy Aspiration
The conference’s equity lens was established early through keynote addresses that framed inequality not as a marginal concern, but as a defining feature of contemporary knowledge systems. A central insight emerged: equity cannot be retrofitted through isolated policies or discounts; it must be embedded into infrastructure, governance arrangements, collaboration models, and long-term system design.
Professor Joyashree Roy positioned climate change as a global public good problem—and scholarly communication as one of its least examined bottlenecks. Researchers from developing regions remain structurally underrepresented not because of limited research activity, but due to persistent barriers in language, access, publication costs, and visibility. In countries where higher education operates primarily in national languages, the expectation that impactful research must be published in English-language journals systematically excludes locally grounded knowledge from global assessment and decision-making.
Professor Bin Zhang, Director of the Library at Renmin University of China, proposed a four-dimensional framework for fairness in knowledge ecosystems: fairness in knowledge production, access, dissemination, and governance. Inequality, he argued, is sustained not only by cost barriers, but by governance structures dominated by developed economies, commercial platforms acting as gatekeepers, and evaluation systems privileging particular venues, languages, and metrics.
Within China, these dynamics are mirrored at national scale, with pronounced East–West and urban–regional imbalances in funding, digital infrastructure, and library capacity. Libraries sit at the centre of this tension. While they play a critical role in expanding access, concentrated budgets, accelerating digitisation, and growing demand for AI and data expertise risk widening institutional gaps, particularly where technical skills are scarce.
At the same time, regional library alliances and consortia—including CALIS, CASHL, and CADAL—illustrate alternative approaches. Shared procurement, coordinated training, and collective infrastructure investment were presented as ways of redistributing capacity and shifting relationships from transactional access toward value co-creation.
- Open Access, Cost Shifting, and the Uneven Geography of Participation
The panel Global Equity in the Shift to Open Access: A Focus on the Asia-Pacific Region moved the equity debate from principle to practice. Across sessions, a shared concern emerged that APC-driven models risk reproducing—and in some cases amplifying—existing inequalities.
As Asian universities pursue global visibility, publishing in Q1 journals remains a strong incentive. However, when each additional article carries a marginal APC cost, research growth itself becomes financially punitive. In regions where output expands faster than funding, this model does not scale.
Operational challenges further complicate the picture. Forecasting publication output under token-based and transformative agreements was described as uncertain, with a small number of prolific authors able to exhaust allocations unexpectedly. Mid-year funding constraints, shifting eligibility rules, and administrative complexity often generate confusion and frustration.
From Southeast Asia, these challenges were framed less as ideological opposition to open access than as questions of affordability, predictability, and alignment with local funding realities. While Diamond OA models are attractive in principle, fragmented infrastructure and sustainability concerns continue to limit scalability without stronger coordination.
A recurring concern was lack of transparency. Pricing mechanisms often replicate historical subscription spend, embedding legacy inequities into new OA agreements. Without shared benchmarks, institutions risk inheriting cost structures misaligned with capacity or strategic priorities.
What emerged clearly was that open access is not a single transition, but a redistribution of financial, administrative, and reputational risk—one that currently falls unevenly across regions and institutions.
- From Institutional Negotiation to System-Level Infrastructure
Several sessions shifted attention from institutional adaptation toward deeper system redesign.
The keynote Beyond One Nation, One Subscription: India’s System-Level Approach to Equitable Access offered a rare national-scale perspective. By pooling national funding to provide uniform access to over 13,000 journals across more than 6,000 institutions, ONOS has equalised baseline research capability—particularly for state universities and affiliated colleges previously operating with minimal access. Crucially, institutions are not asked to contribute equally; capability, not spend, is equalised.
One year in, ONOS remains an evolving model. Questions persist around long-term APC funding, inclusion of private universities, rights retention, and integration with global open-access frameworks. Nonetheless, the initiative has already shifted the conversation beyond subscriptions versus open access, reframing access as national research infrastructure rather than institutional purchasing power.
At a different scale, reflections from JULAC’s case-based work on transformative agreement negotiations in Hong Kong highlighted how technical contract terms shape researcher experience. Inconsistent interpretations of cost neutrality, opaque APC eligibility rules, and mid-contract journal flips were shown to generate confusion, unexpected charges, and loss of trust.
Meanwhile, Alex Westcott Campbell highlighted in another panel the misalignment between global publishing models and local realities. Large “big deal” packages and transformative agreements, while effective in well-funded European and North American contexts, often fail to translate to smaller institutions or emerging research systems. She argued for modular, flexible, and tailored packages—content bundles designed around actual disciplinary needs rather than prestige-driven breadth.
The key takeaway was that effective TA negotiation depends as much on internal process and institutional capacity as on deal terms. Clear eligibility criteria, robust APC accounting, well-prepared research support teams, and strong documentation emerged as critical. Transformative agreements were framed not as a settled solution, but as an evolving practice requiring sustainability over short-term access gains, openness to alternatives such as Diamond OA, and stronger regional collaboration.
- Infrastructure, Identifiers, and the Hidden Work of Integration
As research output expands globally, early-career researchers (ECRs) in emerging research communities face a paradox: never before has so much scholarly content existed, yet barriers to participation—financial, linguistic, technical, and structural—remain stubbornly high. For example, a roundtable on persistent identifiers highlighted a striking paradox: Asia accounts for the largest share of global ORCID registrations, yet institutional integration remains limited. While many researchers hold identifiers, systems are often not synchronised to use them effectively.
Examples from Southeast Asia illustrated a registration–integration gap. In some countries, hundreds of thousands of researchers have ORCID IDs, yet only a small number of platforms can synchronise data. As a result, silos persist and redundant data entry remains common.
An institutional case from Hong Kong demonstrated how PIDs can underpin research management, rankings, and performance monitoring through embedded ORCID profiles, API-based data exchange, and dashboards. Accuracy was emphasised as critical: poor data quality can distort funding decisions, recruitment, and resource allocation.
From the publishing perspective, PIDs were shown to underpin submission, peer review, data publication, and metadata dissemination. Across perspectives, persistent identifiers—ORCID, DOIs, ROR—were framed as trust infrastructure, underpinning discoverability, interoperability, and AI-driven analysis.
From Reflection to Responsibility
Charleston Conference Asia underscored that scholarly communication is not a neutral backdrop to research activity, but an active system shaping participation, visibility, and influence. Asia’s experience makes these dynamics particularly visible, exposing the limitations of global models designed under very different conditions.
Rather than offering a single solution, the conference surfaced a shared responsibility—for libraries, publishers, funders, and policymakers—to treat equity, infrastructure, and governance as interconnected design challenges. The question is no longer whether systems should change, but whether they will change deliberately—or continue to evolve by default, reproducing the inequalities they seek to resolve.
Author’s note: This article was drafted with the assistance of Google Gemini, working from my contemporaneous notes and personal reflections from the day.
Claire Hao is an Associate of Research Consulting and founder of Every Author Hong Kong, focusing on research support consultancy and early-career researcher training.
