KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Although open access initiatives have been on the increase in low-income countries, global disparities persist in terms of who benefits the most from open access publication.
• As one major funder moves to mandatory preprints, could this help redress the balance in terms of research dissemination and citation?

With increasing numbers of open access initiatives established worldwide, why are the benefits of open access not felt by all researchers equally? Recently, Holly Else reported for Nature on why, even though paywalls are falling, researchers from low-income countries are still struggling to be visible in the academic space.

Imbalances

Else and contributor Susan Murray (Executive Director, African Journals OnLine) reflected on the fact that many low-income countries have long established open access publication networks, and that these networks continue to grow. For example, Indonesia now has over 80% of its research activity freely available due to an increase in open access publishing platforms. Despite this, researchers in low-income countries tend to be subject to imbalances of power and resources to a greater degree than those in higher-income countries, which can prevent them from benefiting fully from these systems.

Inequities

Other inequities exacerbate the problem. As previously reported by The Publication Plan, a recent study by Dr Chun-Kai Huang and colleagues showed that the advantages of open access publication, such as increased and more diverse citations, are not felt evenly by researchers across the globe. In this large study of 420 million citations over 10 years, researchers from Northern Europe benefited the most from their work being published open access.

Innovations

Else highlights that, while open access is integral to ensuring the visibility of research, speed of publication is also key. Others have reported on the power of preprints to confer a citation advantage. An interesting development in this area is the move by the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation to move away from funding gold open access and instead require grant recipients to post their work on public preprint servers. It remains to be seen if such changes can help redress the balance in terms of who benefits from open access.

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