Dr.-Ing. Siva Prasad Reddy Muppala, Senior Lecturer in Thermofluids, Combustion and Sustainability at Kingston University London, shares his experience of setting up a new academic journal free of charges, to encourage the sharing of inclusive education good practice.
Over nearly two decades in a UK engineering department, I have encountered academic publishing from almost every vantage point: as an author, a reviewer, a handling editor and now the founder of a journal built to work differently. What has become increasingly difficult to ignore is how the current system quietly excludes the very researchers and practitioners that inclusive education scholarship is meant to serve.
Article processing charges across the sector routinely reach thousands of pounds per paper, while institutional support for those charges is uneven and, in some cases, non-existent. Some colleagues can access funding for one article per year; others report no central support at all, leaving them to pay personally or withdraw from attempting publication. Early career researchers and staff in under-resourced institutions are particularly affected, often finding that, however strong their work, they simply cannot afford to publish it.
Time compounds the problem. Manuscripts, including work from my own doctoral students, can remain under review for many months before any substantive response is received. In a field as closely tied to policy and practice as inclusive education, delays of this length weaken the relevance of findings before they reach those in a position to act on them. Editors know one reason for this all too well: a shortage of reviewer capacity spread across an ever-expanding number of journals, especially for cross-disciplinary work such as inclusive pedagogy within engineering and STEM contexts.
In this environment, it is not surprising that many colleagues are asking where new, more inclusive spaces for publication might come from. One small answer, in my own practice, has been to establish a diamond open-access journal in this area. Advances in Inclusive Education Research (AIER) is a peer-reviewed journal that charges neither authors nor readers and assigns DOIs to every published article. It is supported by an editorial board of seven Associate Editors, recruited before any other infrastructure was built. Much of the existing literature on inclusive education originates in the United States and pays limited attention to STEM and engineering pedagogy; AIER was created to sit in that particular gap, focusing on SEND, equity and inclusion, assessment, technology for diverse learners and policy reform within technical disciplines.
The process of building the journal has been incremental rather than heroic: securing an editorial team, developing outreach across the UK, Africa, India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, and working carefully on scope so that the journal remains both broad enough to be useful and coherent enough to be recognisable. Its timing feels significant. When so many colleagues are struggling to publish work in inclusive education, especially where there is no funding for article processing charges, small, scholar-led initiatives that remove financial barriers can offer one practical route back into the conversation.
For me, AIER is not the solution to systemic issues in academic publishing, but it is an attempt to live differently within them: to create a space where inclusive education researchers in engineering and STEM can share work without having to choose between visibility and affordability. As more of us think about how to support colleagues facing these pressures, there may be value in treating such experiments not as outliers, but as part of a wider shift toward more equitable scholarly communication.
