Attitudes, willingness, and resources to cover article publishing charges: The influence of age, position, income level country, discipline and open access habits

Abstract

The rise of open access (OA) publishing has been followed by the expansion of the Article Publishing Charges (APC) that moves the financial burden of scholarly journal publishing from readers to authors. We introduce the results of an international randomly selected sampled survey (N=3,422) that explores attitudes towards this pay-to-publish or Gold OA model among scholars. We test the predictor role of age, professional position, discipline, and income-level country in this regard. We found that APCs are perceived more as a global threat to Science than a deterrent to personal professional careers. Academics in low and lower-middle income level countries hold the most unfavorable opinions about the APC system. The less experimental disciplines held more negative perceptions of APC compared to STEM and the Life Sciences. Age and access to external funding stood as negative predictors of refusal to pay to publish. Commitment to OA self-archiving predicted the negative global perception of the APC. We conclude that access to external research funds influences the acceptance and the particular perception of the pay to publish model, remarking the economic dimension of the problem and warning about issues in the inequality between center and periphery. Key points• APCs are perceived more as a global threat to Science than a deterrent to personal professional careers • Younger academics and those in low and lower-middle income level countries hold the most unfavorable opinions about the APC system. • The negative perception about APC is higher among Arts & Humanities and Social Science researchers compared to those in STEM and the Life Sciences. • Age and country income level stood as negative predictors of refusal to pay to publish.

How social are open-access debates: a follow-up study of tweeters' sentiments

“…The perceived weak quality may have roots in different factors, including a probable loose reviewing (Togia and Korobili, 2014) leading to low-quality publications (Waller et al ., 2013) and predatory publishing (Tennant et al ., 2016; Swanberg et al ., 2020). Considered a global threat to science (Segado-Boj et al ., 2022), the APC-based model is believed to have the potential to tempt publishers to sacrifice quality for money (Walters, 2007) and thereby pull scientific publishing into vanity and absurdity, with high acceptance rates for affluent authors or institutions (Creaser, 2010; Mischo and Schlembach, 2011). As a tangible example, the so-called ‘peer-review lite’ approach, which is followed by mega journals and claimed to result in a quick publication via a simpler peer review process and higher acceptance rates (McVearry, 2020) is observed to be effective in a significant and growing percentage of publisher income (Butler, 2008).…”

“…, 2017; Waller et al ., 2013; Tenopir et al ., 2017; Dalton et al ., 2020). The negative attitudes and the lack of motivation reportedly relate to several concerns, with the most important and prevalent being high costs, OA journal quality, impact, and prestige, reviewing quality, plagiarism and copyright violation, misinformation, and predatory journals (Togia and Korobili, 2014; Rodriguez, 2014; Yang and Li, 2015; Gaines, 2015; Nicholas et al ., 2015; Almahmud et al ., 2020; Edelmann and Schoßböck, 2020; O'Hanlon et al ., 2020; Scott et al ., 2021; Segado-Boj et al ., 2022). These concerns have formed the main topics of OA literature (Rodrigues et al ., 2016) and remained almost unchanged over years (Mabe and Mulligan, 2011).…”

Authors' choice between parent and mirror journals of Elsevier

“…Moreover, Asai (2021b) investigated countries to which authors belong using large samples and found that authors from low‐income countries amounted to less than 1% of the total authors, whereas most authors in hybrid journals belonged to high‐income countries. Universities and other research institutes in high‐income countries often financially support their associate researchers for open access publishing (Segado‐Boj et al, 2022). If the authors who received financial support believe that it is reasonable for more frequently cited journals to demand higher APCs, they would select a parent journal and pay a higher APC.…”

Jumping over the paywall: Strategies and motivations for scholarly piracy and other alternatives

“…This seems like a triple burden for scholars in the periphery who already lack resources and have a constrained research budget. In addition to not being able to access knowledge through traditional or legal pathways, they also seem to be unaware of the (illegal) solutions to their problems, which add up to the difficulties in paying the article processing charge associated with many OA, well-indexed, journals (Segado-Boj et al, 2022). In this sense, the democratizing role that Sci-Hub and other pirated document repositories claim to play has a limited effect and does not fully reach the Global South.…”