Participation as Open Access: Industry Mentorship, Conference Equity, and the Epistemic Responsibility Gap in South African Higher Education

Open access scholarship has focused predominantly on removing publication paywalls, yet a critical and undertheorised dimension of access remains largely unaddressed: the right not merely to read knowledge, but to participate in the spaces where knowledge is created, validated, and disseminated. Academic conferences are central among these spaces. The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (2021) establishes equity as a foundational principle, requiring that all actors serve as both beneficiaries and contributors to open science. For students at under-resourced institutions in the Global South, this vision remains largely unrealised. This paper presents a case study of a structured industry mentorship intervention in the second half of 2024. The first author served as a voluntary, unpaid industry mentor to seventeen final-year undergraduate students at a South African higher education institution, through a compulsory work-integrated learning module. The cohort comprised fifteen mathematical sciences students (88 percent) and two software engineering students (12 percent). Drawing on Chan et al. (2020), Fricker (2007), Mboa Nkoudou (2016), Lave and Wenger (1991), Mullen and Klimaitis (2021), and Hargreaves and Fullan (2012), the paper documents how a single mentor, investing approximately 300 minutes of structured research across five days, facilitated access to six major professional and academic conferences for all seventeen students at no cost to any of them. All seventeen students attended a minimum of three events. A hackathon team who had never attended such an event was peer-voted second place by conference attendees. These outcomes are analysed against a critical institutional failure: the university’s Dean co-chaired the largest mathematical conference of the year in the region, yet no student in the institution’s mathematics department was informed of free participation provisions. The paper proposes mentored open access as a replicable bridge, argues for embedding conference literacy within the curriculum drawing on Hicks (2018) and Lloyd (2017), and calls for institutional accountability that makes individual intervention unnecessary. Limitations and an ethics note are included.