Which Factors are associated with Open Access Publishing? A Springer Nature Case Study
This research addresses inequalities in academic publishing by identifying barriers to Open Access, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a specific dataset.
The study analyzed 522,411 Springer Nature articles to investigate factors influencing Open Access publishing, finding that authors eligible for APC waivers publish more in gold-OA journals, while those with discounts have the lowest OA rates, and identified country income level, seniority, and OA experience as key predictors for hybrid journals.
Open Access (OA) facilitates access to articles. But, authors or funders often must pay the publishing costs preventing authors who do not receive financial support from participating in OA publishing and citation advantage for OA articles. OA may exacerbate existing inequalities in the publication system rather than overcome them. To investigate this, we studied 522,411 articles published by Springer Nature. Employing correlation and regression analyses, we describe the relationship between authors affiliated with countries from different income levels, their choice of publishing model, and the citation impact of their papers. A machine learning classification method helped us to explore the importance of different features in predicting the publishing model. The results show that authors eligible for APC waivers publish more in gold-OA journals than others. In contrast, authors eligible for an APC discount have the lowest ratio of OA publications, leading to the assumption that this discount insufficiently motivates authors to publish in gold-OA journals. We found a strong correlation between the journal rank and the publishing model in gold-OA journals, whereas the OA option is mostly avoided in hybrid journals. Also, results show that the countries' income level, seniority, and experience with OA publications are the most predictive factors for OA publishing in hybrid journals.