Abstract
Abstract Journals publishing open access (OA) articles often require that authors pay article processing charges (APC). Researchers in the Global South often cite APCs as a major financial obstacle to OA publishing, especially in widely recognized or prestigious outlets. Consequently, it has been hypothesized that authors from the Global South will be underrepresented in journals charging APCs. We tested this hypothesis using more than 37,000 articles from Elsevier’s “Mirror journal” system, in which a hybrid “Parent” journal and its Gold OA “Mirror” share editorial boards and standards for acceptance. Most articles were non-OA; 45% of articles had lead authors based in either the United States or China. After correcting for the effect of this dominance and differences in sample size, we found that OA articles published in Parent and Mirror journals had lead authors with similar Geographic Diversity. However, Author Geographic Diversity of OA articles was significantly lower than that of non-OA articles. Most OA articles were written by authors in high-income countries, and there were no articles in Mirror journals by authors in low-income countries. Our results for Elsevier’s Mirror-Parent system are consistent with the hypothesis that APCs are a barrier to OA publication for scientists from the Global South.
Highlights
Open Access articles can be read without payment or subscription to the journal in which they were published, and the number of open access (OA) articles published annually continues to grow dramatically (Piwowar et al, 2018)
We identified the date of the first publication in each Mirror journal and downloaded the records of all articles published in the corresponding Parent journal from that date through July 2020 (Table 1)
The authors of single-authored OA articles in Mirror and Parent journals were based in N = 38 and N = 15, respectively (Table 2)
Summary
Open Access articles can be read without payment or subscription to the journal in which they were published, and the number of OA articles published annually continues to grow dramatically (Piwowar et al, 2018). OA articles can garner more online views, have higher download rates, and accrue more citations over time than articles in subscription outlets (Davis, 2011; Eysenbach, 2006; Wang, Liu, Mao, & Fang, 2015). Metrics such as these are increasingly taken into consideration when conducting performance evaluations of scientists, including the tenure and promotion process in academic institutions (Schimanski & Alperin, 2018). These benefits may accrue regardless of whether publishing in ‘Gold OA’ journals, where all articles are immediately available, in ‘hybrid’ journals that publish both OA and subscription-only content, or when authors place a version of their article in a repository (i.e., self-archiving or “Green OA)
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