Open Access Publishing Probabilities Based on Gender and Authorship Structures in Vietnam

Abstract

Open access (OA) publishing is beneficial for researchers to improve recognition, representation, and visibility in academia. However, few studies have been conducted for studying the association between gender and OA publishing likelihood. Therefore, the current study explores the impacts of gender-based authorship structures on OA publishing in Vietnamese social sciences and humanities. Bayesian analysis was performed on a dataset of 3122 publications in social sciences and humanities. We found that publications with mixed-gender authorship were most likely to be published under Gold Access terms (26.31–31.65%). In contrast, the likelihood of publications with the solely male or female author(s) was lower. It is also notable that if female researcher(s) held the first-author position in an article of mixed-gender authorship, the publication would be less likely to be published under Gold Access terms (26.31% compared to 31.65% of male-first-author structure). In addition, publications written by a solo female author (14.19%) or a group of female authors (10.72%) had lower OA publishing probabilities than those written by a solely male author(s) (17.14%). These findings hint at the possible advantage of gender diversity and the disadvantage of gender homophily (especially female-only authorship) on OA publishing likelihood. Moreover, they show there might be some negative impacts of gender inequality on OA publishing. As a result, the notion of gender diversity, financial and policy supports are recommended to promote the open science movement.

Changing the Academic Gender Narrative through Open Access

“…Exploration of the effect of open access on the gender narrative is limited [11]. To understand it further, we discuss a small body of research showing that within some disciplines and some geographic locations, women are making use of open access channels to share their research output with positive effects on the gender narrative.…”

“…The article also notes the high APCs of publishing can reduce Gold OA as a venue for women who lack resources and encouragement in this endeavour. In related research, Ngyuen et al [11] analysed 3122 social science and humanities publications from the SSPHA, finding more articles with mixed authors (men and women) published as Gold OA than solo men or women authors.…”

“…In the literature examples discussed above, showing women academics' use of open access to disseminate their research (Table 1), women feature as first authors in five articles [11,24,35,37,38] and as the corresponding author in one article [36]. This suggests that women are interested in and driven to undertake research about open access performance with a focus on gender.…”

“…Analyses that utilise country, organisational and discipline-based databases as sources for name gender disambiguation may be more reliable. For example, Vuong et al and Nguyen et al used SSHPA, the Vietnamese social sciences and humanities database [11,36]. Ruggieri, Pecoraro and Luzi analysed the output from the CNR, where they are employed, and whose author names and gender are familiar [37].…”

“…Analysis of research productivity and performance in academia highlights gender disparities and deficits for women compared to men in most disciplines [10]. However, there is limited investigation into the gender balance of open access research [11]. In this paper, we investigate open access research output through a binary gender perspective to understand how this may change the deficit gender narrative around research productivity.…”