The research project “A comparative analysis of open science, access and circulation of knowledge in Latin America and Africa” is led by Fernanda Beigel (CECIC) and funded by GRIP.
Among its findings, the research has shown how researchers value Open Access in scientific publications, one of the reasons being their high citation rates, which can translate into greater recognition of their results. However, when such academics decide to publish in an Open Access journal, they face a series of factors that are not always compatible: their prestige in the field of study, the impact of the journal and its position in international rankings, the time needed to evaluate and publish the article, and the availability of sufficient resources to pay the APCs imposed by the journal.
Under these devices, articles become free for readers, but the cost of publication is transferred to the authors or to the author’s institutions. This new commercialization model is being strongly promoted by journals belonging to the dominant oligopolies, indexed by databases such as Web of Science – Clarivate and Scopus, which have historically been producing what are understood as prestige indicators.
These dynamics also lead science funding agencies to experience increasing pressure to respond to the demands for payment of APCs with public resources, which have always been limited. At the same time, agencies, universities, and researchers have been energizing a profound debate on the relationship between editorial practices and the criteria for incorporation/stability/promotion in scientific careers, together with the new forms of communication needed to promote socially relevant research.
This new situation poses a dilemma for researchers: either pay to become a globally accepted researcher or remain a less prestigious and underfunded local researcher. The dilemma is particularly strong for those in semi-peripheral (or Global South) countries, as this model increases open access publication costs, known as article processing charges (APCs). This places a high financial burden on authors whose universities do not have the material resources to sign transformative agreements.
Precisely because of the complexity of studying this problem, during 2023, colleagues from the Center for the Study of the Circulation of Knowledge (CECIC, Mendoza-Argentina) who are part of this project developed a survey that was applied in the second half of 2023 in 5 countries: Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, South Africa and Senegal. The target population of this survey is the body of accredited researchers in each country, selected by the national categorization systems. In the cases mentioned: SNI in Mexico, NRF in South Africa, CONICET in Argentina, CNPq in Brazil, and CAMES for the French-speaking countries of Africa. It is therefore an inquiry into the practices and perceptions of a universe of researchers subject to similar evaluation mechanisms and publication pressures. The survey not only addresses the issues of Open Access with APC but also the knowledge of the green and diamond pathways, as well as the definition of a prestigious journal in each discipline. It also delves into researchers’ perceptions of the challenges and future of scholarly publishing, enriched with a qualitative analysis of the last section of the survey, dedicated to the ethical debate underlying the commodification of science.
The second part of this project involves the bibliometric analysis of the population of researchers in each National Research System, to obtain a description of the production and circulation styles, together with the list of journals and their APC costs. The basis of this study is the harvesting of all publications self-loaded by researchers in each participating country and their comparison with other sources. There is a large literature that discusses the biases of the traditional databases available and shows that there are very important portions of the world production that is not covered by WoS and Scopus. Mostly that linked to social sciences or published locally (Ràfols, Ciarli & Chavarro, 2015; Marginson, 2021; Doğan, Taşkın, Kulczycki & Pölönen, 2022). In this sense it is worth exploring Open Alex because it is a new bibliometrics infrastructure, open and collaborative, born with the closure of Microsoft Academics, which has become an alternative due to its advances in the integration of international sources.
By combining the survey and the study of publications, the project contributes to the development of a novel approach, combining sociology and bibliometrics, which is in full development worldwide. The survey will provide information on the individual perceptions and strategies of researchers, while the bibliometric analysis in Open Alex will provide a snapshot of the production of these individuals, their accessibility and costs in terms of APC. The bibliometric analysis will also be able to inform public agencies about the incidence of predatory journals, and therefore has an applied potential in that it will provide inputs to promote a national policy of non-commercial open access.