Étiquette : gold open access

Catégories
EN

Funders open access mandates: uneven uptake and challenging models

Authors : Lucía Céspedes, Madelaine Hare, Simon van Bellen, Philippe Mongeon, Vincent Larivière

Over the last two decades, research funders have adopted Open Access (OA) mandates, with various forms and success. While some funders emphasize gold OA through article processing charges, others favour green OA and repositories, leading to a fragmented policy landscape.

Compliance with these mandates depends on several factors, including disciplinary field, monitoring, and availability of repository infrastructure. Based on 5 million papers supported by 36 funders from 20 countries, 11 million papers funded by other organisations, and 10 million papers without any funding reported, this study explores how different policies influence the adoption of OA.

Findings indicate a sustained growth in OA overall, especially hybrid and gold OA, and that funded papers are more likely to be OA than unfunded papers. Those results suggest that policies such as Plan S, as well as read-and-publish agreements, have had a strong influence on OA adoption, especially among European funders.

However, the global low uptake of Diamond OA and limited indexing of OA outputs in Latin American countries highlight ongoing disparities, influenced by funding constraints, journal visibility, and regional infrastructure challenges.

URL : Funders open access mandates: uneven uptake and challenging models

Arxiv : https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.03457

Catégories
EN

APC waivers and Ukraine’s publishing output in Gold OA journals: Evidence from five commercial publishers

Author : Serhii Nazarovets

This study examines the effect of article processing charge (APC) waivers on the participation of Ukrainian researchers in fully Gold Open Access (Gold OA) journals published by the five largest academic publishers – Elsevier, SAGE, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley – during the period 2019-2024.

These publishers were selected because, in response to the full-scale war launched against Ukraine in 2022, all five introduced emergency 100% APC-waiver policies for Ukrainian authors. Using bibliometric data from the Web of Science Core Collection, the study analyses publication trends in Ukrainian-authored articles in fully Gold OA journals of these publishers before and after 2022.

The results show a marked post-2022 increase in Ukraine’s Gold OA output, particularly in journals published by Springer Nature and Elsevier. Disciplinary and publisher-specific patterns are evident, with especially strong growth in the medical and applied sciences. The findings underscore the potential of targeted support measures during times of crisis, while also illustrating the inherent limitations of APC-based publishing models in fostering equitable scholarly communication.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2505.12134

Catégories
EN

An APC Trap? Privilege and the Perception of Reasonableness in Open Access Publishing

Authors : Melissa H. Cantrell, Jennifer A. Mezick, Matthew Estill, Rachel Caldwell &
Lauren B. Collister

Introduction: This article investigates funding sources reported by authors of open access (OA) articles at four R1 (doctoral-granting institutions in the United States with very high research activity) universities, along with these authors’ perceptions of Article Processing Charges (APCs). The study suggests a cognitive dissonance among many respondents, in which there appears to be a desire and willingness to participate in OA publishing, which is at odds with a sense of unreasonableness and an uneven distribution of the ability of researchers to participate.

Literature review: Much of the literature on APCs centers on rising prices, how commercial publishers profit from this model, and the resulting inequities in OA publishing. Some information exists about resources for funding APCs, including grant funding, library programs, and fee waivers.

Methods: We surveyed authors who published an OA article in the calendar year 2022. The survey asked whether there was an APC, the funding source for the fee, and the author’s perception of the reasonableness of APC prices and their relative ability to pay compared with their peers.

Results: From 321 total respondents, grant funding was the largest source of APC funding, and authors reported fees of over $1,500 in U.S. dollars as unreasonable.

Discussion: This study confirms the hypothesis that external grants are the primary support for authors paying APCs, and beyond that, authors use a variety of sources to support their publishing fees. Respondents characterized APCs in general as unreasonable for less well-resourced colleagues.

Conclusion: Though authors were generally able to find funding or have fees waived, they perceive a threshold of reasonableness for APCs.

URL : An APC Trap? Privilege and the Perception of Reasonableness in Open Access Publishing

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.18184

Catégories
EN

Does open access foster interdisciplinary citations? Decomposing open access citation advantage

Authors : Kai Nishikawa, Akiyoshi Murakami

The existence of an open access (OA) citation advantage—that is, whether OA increases citations—has been a topic of interest for many years. Although numerous studies have focused on whether OA increases citations, expectations for OA go beyond that. One such expectation is the promotion of knowledge transfer across various fields.

This study aimed to clarify what effects OA, particularly gold OA, has on knowledge transfer across fields. Specifically, we measure the effect of OA on interdisciplinary and within-discipline citation counts by decomposing an existing OA citation advantage metric.

OA increased both interdisciplinary and within-discipline citations in many fields studied, and only interdisciplinary citations in chemistry, computer science, and clinical medicine. In these three fields, clinical medicine showed a tendency toward interdisciplinary citations, independent of journal or paper.

These findings suggest that OA fosters knowledge transfer across disciplines.

URL : Does open access foster interdisciplinary citations? Decomposing open access citation advantage

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-025-05297-z

Catégories
EN

Open access, open infrastructures, and their funding: Learning from histories to more effectively enhance diamond OA ecologies for books

Authors  : Kira Hopkins, Kevin Sanders

The decade since the “Bottlenecks in the Open Access System” special issue of JLSC in 2014 has been an expansive one for open access (OA) and OA books in particular. The creation of a scholarly publishing ecosystem that enables works to be freely accessible for readers has been successful in many ways.

However, the underlying politics and economics of OA scholarly publishing often remain opaque or under-interrogated (Lawson et al., 2015). The problems with journal OA funding, specifically regarding inequality of access to publishing, discussed by Bonaccorso et al. (2014) in their contribution to that issue, have also increased and become entrenched as we discuss below.

This entrenchment has been largely via the growth and consolidation of gold OA, “transformative” agreements, and read-and-publish journal deals, which have effectively, and unnecessarily, commodified OA publications. We would argue that this is in direct tension with some of the foundations of contemporary OA.

OA was explicitly described from early principles as not a business model and as aiming to reduce financial barriers from authors, libraries, and other groups (Suber, 2024). We would like to note that, while the main focus of this paper is books, we begin with a discussion of journals. This is because we are focusing on the history, development, and critiques of OA fundings in the intervening ten years following the “Bottlenecks” special issue.

OA journal publishing has been at the forefront of discussions of OA funding, and it has dominated the last decade, and more, of this discussion; it would therefore be remiss of us not to discuss this history, the resulting current landscape of inequity, and the potential ramifications if this were to be transferred to OA books, a more nascent field in general.

URL : Open access, open infrastructures, and their funding: Learning from histories to more effectively enhance diamond OA ecologies for books

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.18284

 

Catégories
EN

Academic Quality or Commercial Concern? The Role of APCs in Open-Access Communication Studies Journals

Author : Burak Ili

Despite the positive effects of the open access (OA) movement on academic publishing, commercial publishers’ profit-driven policies continue to prevail, making the publishing process increasingly difficult for many researchers, particularly those from developing countries. T

his study critically examines open-access Q1 and Q2 journals listed in the Scimago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) within the field of Media and Communication Studies.

Despite the OA movement’s goal of increasing access to information, the capitalist academic publishing model transforms knowledge production into a commercial activity through article processing charges (APCs). The research reveals that high APCs demanded by high-impact journals represent a significant barrier, especially for researchers with limited financial and institutional support.

This situation underscores the urgent need for institutional reform in the structure of academic publishing, particularly within the field of Media and Communication Studies.

The proposed reforms should focus on critical areas such as increased support for OA models, freeing journals and editorial boards from Western monopolies, fairly compensating the labour of reviewers and editors, and offering greater language support.

Steps taken in this direction will contribute to the creation of a more transparent, fair, and inclusive structure for academic production and sharing processes.

URL : Academic Quality or Commercial Concern? The Role of APCs in Open-Access Communication Studies Journals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v23i1.1547

Catégories
EN

Field-specific gold open access dynamics in the Chinese mainland: Overviews, disparities, and strategic insights

Authors : Xinyi Chen, Zhiqiang Liu

Gold Open Access (OA) journals are crucial for scholarly communication, highlighting the need for a thorough evaluation of their academic influence on different research fields. This study leverages the InCites platform to examine article-level characteristics relating to 22 Essential Science Indicators (ESI) research fields, with a focus on the dynamics of gold OA articles, including gold OA uptake in the Chinese mainland and gold OA adoption in the domestic English-language academic journal publishing of the Chinese mainland.

The findings reveal that disparities in gold OA adoption across 22 ESI fields are more pronounced in the Chinese mainland compared with the world scenario. In the Chinese mainland, there is a significant polarization in gold OA publishing volumes across different ESI fields, particularly in Chemistry, Clinical Medicine, and Engineering.

This study builds on the understanding of OA citation advantage (OACA) by incorporating gold OA publishing volume into a two-dimensional framework, resulting in the development of a “distance” metric. It further categorizes gold OA citation effects into four quadrants: positive citation effects (quadrants A and B) and negative citation effects (quadrants C and D), based on category normalized citation impact (CNCI) and journal normalized citation impact (JNCI) indicators from the InCites database.

The findings underscore the importance of developing tailored strategies to address field-specific challenges and promote gold OA dynamics in the Chinese mainland; while prioritizing high-quality gold OA journals is essential for fostering gold OA development in the rest of the world.

URL : Field-specific gold open access dynamics in the Chinese mainland: Overviews, disparities, and strategic insights

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1630