The impact of article processing charge waiver on conducting research in low-income countries

Abdul-Baki, Mohammad-Nasan; Hussein, Mahmoud Alhaj

doi:10.1186/s13031-021-00413-1

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Likewise, Frank, Foster and Pagliari (2023, p. 1) insist on the inequities that the APC model presents 'for junior or unfunded researchers, and academics from resource-poor environments, for whom an increasing body of evidence shows clear evidence of discrimination and injustice'. Similar problems have been described for researchers in Africa (Chilimo et al, 2017;Mekonnen et al, 2022;Nabyonga-Orem et al, 2020;Raju & Pietersen, 2017), India (Jain et al, 2021) or Syria (Abdul Baki & Alhaj Hussein, 2021). At disciplinary level, Wright (2019) states that not all environmental science receives funding from large institutions and a lot of work, especially in developing nations, is undertaken on small grants from environmental nongovernmental organizations.…”

Section: Inequities Introduced By Apcsmentioning

confidence: 73%

Article processing charges for open access journal publishing: A review

Borrego

2023

Learned Publishing

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Some open access (OA) publishers charge authors fees to make their articles freely available online. This paper reviews literature on article processing charges (APCs) that has been published since 2000. Despite praise for diamond OA journals, which charge no fees, most OA articles are published by commercial publishers that charge APCs. Publishers fix APCs depending on the reputation assigned to journals by peers. Evidence shows a relationship between high impact metrics and higher, faster rising APCs.Authors express reluctance about APCs, although this varies by discipline depending on previous experience of paying publication fees and the availability of research grants to cover them. Authors rely on a mix of research grants, library funds and personal assets to pay the charges. Two major concerns have been raised in relation to APCs: the inability of poorly funded authors to publish research and their impact on journal quality. Waivers have not solved the first issue. Research shows little extension of waiver use, unintended side effects on co-author networks and concerns regarding criteria to qualify for them. Bibliometric studies concur that journals that charge APCs have a similar citation impact to journals that rely on other income sources.

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Section: Inequities Introduced By Apcsmentioning

confidence: 73%

Article processing charges for open access journal publishing: A review

Borrego

2023

Learned Publishing

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“…In some countries, for example, there are different transformative agreements with publishers or different ways of covering possible APCs for OA (Klebel and Ross-Hellauer, 2023;Sch€ onfelder, 2018). There are APC waivers and discounts for low-and middle-income countries, but it is questionable who can benefit from this in different parts of the world (Abdul Baki and Alhaj Hussein, 2021;Momeni et al, 2023;Nabyonga-Orem et al, 2020;Smith et al, 2021). This may result in research findings not being published in different parts of the world due to lack of funding or to researchers publishing behind paywalls (Ross-Hellauer et al, 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The emergence of preprints: comparing publishing behaviour in the Global South and the Global North

Biesenbender,

Smirnova,

Mayr

et al. 2024

OIR

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PurposeThe recent proliferation of preprints could be a way for researchers worldwide to increase the availability and visibility of their research findings. Against the background of rising publication costs caused by the increasing prevalence of article processing fees, the search for other ways to publish research results besides traditional journal publication may increase. This could be especially true for lower-income countries.Design/methodology/approachTherefore, the authors are interested in the experiences and attitudes towards posting and using preprints in the Global South as opposed to the Global North. To explore whether motivations and concerns about posting preprints differ, the authors adopted a mixed-methods approach, combining a quantitative survey of researchers with focus group interviews.FindingsThe authors found that respondents from the Global South were more likely to agree to adhere to policies and to emphasise that mandates could change publishing behaviour towards open access. They were also more likely to agree posting preprints has a positive impact. Respondents from the Global South and the Global North emphasised the importance of peer-reviewed research for career advancement.Originality/valueThe study has identified a wide range of experiences with and attitudes towards posting preprints among researchers in the Global South and the Global North. To the authors' knowledge, this has hardly been studied before, which is also because preprints only have emerged lately in many disciplines and countries.Peer reviewThe peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-04-2023-0181

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“…The relatively lower economic and time barrier to posting means that work is made available earlier in a project's development, and may even be the only public output of a project [30,31]. The low barrier to entry for preprints could be particularly powerful for developing countries, where lack of financial resources for publication and lack of institutional library support makes research, especially that published in peer-reviewed channels, more difficult [32][33][34].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

PreprintMatch: A tool for preprint to publication detection shows global inequities in scientific publication

Eckmann

Bandrowski

2023

PLoS ONE

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Preprints, versions of scientific manuscripts that precede peer review, are growing in popularity. They offer an opportunity to democratize and accelerate research, as they have no publication costs or a lengthy peer review process. Preprints are often later published in peer-reviewed venues, but these publications and the original preprints are frequently not linked in any way. To this end, we developed a tool, PreprintMatch, to find matches between preprints and their corresponding published papers, if they exist. This tool outperforms existing techniques to match preprints and papers, both on matching performance and speed. PreprintMatch was applied to search for matches between preprints (from bioRxiv and medRxiv), and PubMed. The preliminary nature of preprints offers a unique perspective into scientific projects at a relatively early stage, and with better matching between preprint and paper, we explored questions related to research inequity. We found that preprints from low income countries are published as peer-reviewed papers at a lower rate than high income countries (39.6% and 61.1%, respectively), and our data is consistent with previous work that cite a lack of resources, lack of stability, and policy choices to explain this discrepancy. Preprints from low income countries were also found to be published quicker (178 vs 203 days) and with less title, abstract, and author similarity to the published version compared to high income countries. Low income countries add more authors from the preprint to the published version than high income countries (0.42 authors vs 0.32, respectively), a practice that is significantly more frequent in China compared to similar countries. Finally, we find that some publishers publish work with authors from lower income countries more frequently than others.

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The impact of article processing charge waiver on conducting research in low-income countries

Cited by 6 publications

References 4 publications

Article processing charges for open access journal publishing: A review

Article processing charges for open access journal publishing: A review

The emergence of preprints: comparing publishing behaviour in the Global South and the Global North

PreprintMatch: A tool for preprint to publication detection shows global inequities in scientific publication

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