5:44 p.m.
A. Olejniczak and M.J. Wilson, "Who’s writing open access (OA)
articles? Characteristics of OA authors at Ph.D.-granting institutions
in the United States," posted 10/7/20 in *Quantitative Science
Studies* (MIT Press): https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00091
abstract
The open access (OA) publication movement aims to present research
literature to the public at no cost and with no restrictions. While
the democratization of access to scholarly literature is a primary
focus of the movement, it remains unclear whether OA has uniformly
democratized the corpus of freely available research, or whether
authors who choose to publish in OA venues represent a particular
subset of scholars—those with access to resources enabling them to
afford article processing charges (APCs). We investigated the number
of OA articles with article processing charges (APC OA) authored by
182,320 scholars with known demographic and institutional
characteristics at American research universities across 11 broad
fields of study. The results show, in general, that the likelihood for
a scholar to author an APC OA article increases with male gender,
employment at a prestigious institution (AAU member universities),
association with a STEM discipline, greater federal research funding,
and more advanced career stage (i.e., higher professorial rank).
Participation in APC OA publishing appears to be skewed toward
scholars with greater access to resources and job security.
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Jan Szczepański
F.d Förste bibliotekarie och chef för f.d Avdelningen för humaniora,
vid f.d. Centralbiblioteket, Göteborgs universitetsbibliotek
E-post: Jan.Szczepanski63 at gmail.com