Abstract
The open access (OA) publication movement aims to present research literature to the public at no cost and with no restrictions. While the democratization of access to scholarly literature is a primary focus of the movement, it remains unclear whether OA has uniformly democratized the corpus of freely available research, or whether authors who choose to publish in OA venues represent a particular subset of scholars—those with access to resources enabling them to afford article processing charges (APCs). We investigated the number of OA articles with article processing charges (APC OA) authored by 182,320 scholars with known demographic and institutional characteristics at American research universities across 11 broad fields of study. The results show, in general, that the likelihood for a scholar to author an APC OA article increases with male gender, employment at a prestigious institution (AAU member universities), association with a STEM discipline, greater federal research funding, and more advanced career stage (i.e., higher professorial rank). Participation in APC OA publishing appears to be skewed toward scholars with greater access to resources and job security.
Highlights
We propose that zero-inflation in the article processing charges (APCs) open access (OA) or total OA article count data reflects a hurdle not overcome by scholars, related to: (a) a lack of publishing activity overall; or (b) a lack of federal funding supporting one’s research; public research funders increasingly mandate that grant recipients publish in OA venues so federal support may be a strong predictor of nonzero OA article counts
Most fields show a pronounced increase in the likelihood of authoring APC OA articles if federal research grants were won, including two fields in which the likelihood of publishing at least one APC OA article increases by a factor more than 2.0 if a scholar has won a federal grant (Tables 3–5)
In the APC OA model, we found that male gender predicts greater APC OA article authorship counts in 10 of 11 fields, including two fields (Education and Health Professions Sciences) where men are expected to author more than 1.3 times as many APC OA articles as women
Summary
In light of these different OA types, we ask two specific questions: (a) What are the characteristics of authors who intend to publish openly immediately (i.e., who choose to publish OA articles), and (b) Which authors are represented in the OA literature, regardless of the means or type of OA?
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