Ramen Budgets and Publication Fees: The Hidden Cost of an Indonesian Student's First Paper

A Choice Between Dinner and a DOI

The average article processing charge at a mid-tier open-access journal runs between $500 and $2,500. For an American graduate student, that figure is daunting. For an undergraduate in Surabaya or Makassar, it can represent six months of living expenses — rent, transportation, and yes, food.

At Publikasi Mahasiswa, we spend a great deal of time celebrating the intellectual output of Indonesian students. Less often do we discuss what that output actually costs, and who absorbs the expense. The answer, it turns out, is frequently the students themselves, funded by an informal economy that would surprise many American readers of this site.

The Arisan Solution

Consider the arisan — a rotating savings circle familiar to households across Indonesia. Members contribute a fixed amount on a regular schedule, and each cycle one member takes the full pot. Traditionally used for household goods or small business capital, the arisan has quietly become a publication financing mechanism.

Rani Wulandari, a fifth-year public health student at Universitas Airlangga, joined a four-person arisan with her thesis group specifically to cover the APC at a Scopus-indexed journal. 'We each put in 300,000 rupiah a month,' she explains. 'Whoever's paper was accepted first got the pot. It took me two rounds.' Her article on hand-washing behavior in rural clinics eventually cost her group roughly $75 in collective contributions — a fraction of the sticker price, achieved through trust and patience rather than institutional support.

This is mutual aid, but it is also a symptom. When scholarly publishing systems assume resources that students in Jakarta or Yogyakarta do not have, students build their own financial infrastructure. American academics may recognize the pattern from crowdfunding threads on academic Twitter, but the arisan version is older, quieter, and entirely offline.

Working the Warung Shift

Not every student has a savings circle. Dimas Prakoso, an engineering undergraduate in Bandung, funded his conference registration by working evening shifts at a warung — a street-side food stall — near his campus. 'Two plates of nasi goreng is about one hour of my shift,' he calculates. 'My registration fee was about sixty hours of nasi goreng.'

Dimas's arithmetic is not a metaphor. It is the actual exchange rate between scholarly participation and street food in his life, and it reframes what 'accessibility' means in open science discourse. Conferences that waive fees for students from developing nations help, but waivers are limited and competitive. The warung shift is not.

There is a certain irony that American universities — which have endowments larger than Indonesia's entire higher education budget — increasingly rely on Indonesian student labor, data, and field sites for research on tropical disease, disaster resilience, and agriculture. The students providing that groundwork are often eating their way toward publication one shift at a time.

The Open-Access Workaround

The third student in our informal survey, Siti Rahmawati, took a different path: she avoided APCs entirely. Her strategy involved a hierarchy of options — institutional repositories first, then journals offering fee waivers for authors from low- and middle-income countries, then reputable no-fee journals, and only as a last resort, preprint servers.

Siti's approach reflects a growing literacy among Indonesian undergraduates about the predatory publishing industry. Where a previous generation of students, desperate to see their names in print, sometimes fell victim to journals that would publish anything for a fee, today's students share waiver lists and journal blacklists in WhatsApp groups. It is peer review of the publishing industry itself, conducted informally and at no cost.

What American Academia Should Notice

For US-based readers — professors, journal editors, graduate students — the lesson is not simply that Indonesian students are resourceful. It is that the global publishing system prices out precisely the researchers whose local knowledge is most valuable to international scholarship.

Several practical responses are within reach of American institutions. Journals could extend automatic APC waivers to authors from lower-middle-income countries like Indonesia rather than requiring case-by-case applications. US universities with research partnerships in Southeast Asia could budget for local co-author publication costs as a line item, the way they budget for travel. Faculty who review for journals could advocate for double-anonymous peer review, which reduces geographic bias in acceptance rates.

None of these reforms require the students to work more warung shifts. That, ultimately, is the point. The arisan circles and food-stall economics represent remarkable ingenuity, but ingenuity should not be a prerequisite for scholarly participation. The next breakthrough paper from an Indonesian campus should be funded by the system that will benefit from it — not by the person who wrote it, one plate of nasi goreng at a time.