Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2020 16:48:15 -0700

Here is an article that will set the cat among the pigeons and the
pigeons a-twittering.  Written from the Academic Analytics Research
Center in Columbus, the article undertakes a careful statistical study
of 182,000 authors of articles published Open Access with Article
Processing Charges, to determine the demographics of this important
slice of OA authorship.  The blunt conclusion is that authors of such
articles are likely to be more male, more senior, with more federal
research funding, and housed in more prestigious (indeed more likely
private) institutions.  Read that way, it says that publishing OA is a
privilege for the privileged.

But this is paradoxical territory.  What it also says is that the
articles being published OA with APCs are more likely to be articles
that readers without privilege around the world will be most likely
interested in reading.  Read in this way, this article says that OA
with APCs is opening up precisely the materials that should be most
readily available that way.   The article itself is OA.   Details,
DOI, and abstract below.

Jim O'Donnell
ASU

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.