Article processing charges, the geographic diversity of author communities, and barriers to publication for authors in the Global South
Many OA journals require authors pay an article processing charge (APC), which researchers in the Global South often cite as an insurmountable financial barrier. This has led to speculation that there will be lower representation of these authors in OA journals charging APCs. We used “mirror journals” – APC-charging OA versions of paywalled (PW) titles with whom they share editorial boards and standards for acceptance – to investigate the relationship between APCs and the geographic diversity of authors. Most of the >41,000 articles we reviewed were published in PW journals. Although lead authors were based in >140 countries, ~45% were based in either the United States of America (USA) or China. After correcting for differences in sample size, we found no difference between OA and PW journals in the number of countries in which lead authors were based. After correcting for the dominance of China and the USA, we found that author diversity in OA journals was significantly lower than in PW journals. Most OA articles were written by authors in high-income countries; no articles in OA journals had first authors from low-income countries. Our results suggest APCs are a barrier to OA publication for scientists from the Global South.