Study finds open-access papers have fewer lead authors from low-income countries than paywalled articles
Credit: Rahel Patrasso/Reuters/Alamy
“One of the great ironies of open access is that you grant authors around the world the ability to finally read the scientific literature that was completely closed off to them, but it ends up excluding them from publishing in the same journals,” says Emilio Bruna, an ecologist and scholar of Latin American studies at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
The Dutch publisher Elsevier’s ‘mirror journals’ pilot project, which ran from 2018 to 2020, offered Bruna’s team an opportunity. Under this programme, existing hybrid journals, which contain both paywalled and freely accessible articles, shared titles and editorial and peer-review processes with fully open-access versions, termed mirror journals. “It’s as close as you can get to a natural experiment,” Bruna says.
“When we see results like this, it just makes it crystal clear that there is a very strong financial barrier for publishing when journals charge APCs,” says Rafael Zenni, an ecologist at the Federal University of Lavras in Brazil. “It’s something that we face every day. In our research grants, there are rarely any resources for publishing fees.”
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