[August 2025] GRIP-APC project releases the open dataset with the findings of an international survey on Publishing practices and APC costs (Latin America and Africa)
The results of the international survey conducted by the GRIP-APC project are now openly available in Zenodo.
Between 2023 and 2024, a team of international researchers, led by Fernanda Beigel (CECIC-CONICET) and funded by the Global Research institute of Paris, studied the impact of article processing charges (APCs) in four countries: Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa. The results of the first phase of the project offer insight into how scientists in non-hegemonic contexts respond to transformations in the publishing ecosystem resulting from the development of open access.
The study collected primary data from 13,577 responses to an online questionnaire administered to scientific researchers in four target countries between August 2023 and February 2024. The main objective of this survey was to gather detailed information about researchers’ positions in their national fields, their publishing practices, access to funding, and their perceptions of open access and article processing charges (APCs). The research team designed the survey and translated it into Portuguese and Spanish, incorporating adaptations to each country’s scientific systems and career guidelines. Respondent confidentiality was prioritized, with all sensitive information removed from the dataset prior to publication.
The GRIP-APC study has generated a comprehensive set of resources that broaden our understanding of open access publishing in the Global South. Key results include an open database with the survey, references to articles in indexed journals on APC practices and national funding agency policies, a technical report on the context in Brazil, and preprints that preview future scientific communications by the team. Together, these contributions provide a better understanding of the ways in which researchers in Latin America and Africa are facing the new trends in scientific communication. At the same time, they offer recommendations on how to address the challenges that the commercial business models pose to equitable participation in the circulation of knowledge.
All results are openly available in the project’s Zenodo Community. Below is a list of all the resources related to the project that are openly available.
Gallardo, O., Appel, A. L., Bruccoleri Ochoa, M., GRIP-APC, T., Milia, M., Montoya, V., van Schalkwyk, F., & Beigel, F. (2025). A comparative analysis of open science, access, APC, and circulation of knowledge. A dataset from a survey of researchers in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa. [Data set]. Global Research Institute of Paris. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16414892
Gallardo, O., Milia, M., Appel, A. L., GRIP-APC Team, & van Schalkwyk, F. (2025). When researchers pay to publish: Results from a survey on APCs in four countries (Version v1) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16463507
Appel, A. L., Milia, M., Rodriguez Medina, L., GRIP-APC Team, & Beigel, F. (2025). Saberes y prácticas de publicación en acceso abierto: un estudio comparativo sobre Brasil, Argentina y México. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16461364
Albagli, S., Appel, A. L., Pacanaro Trinca, T., Alves, L. de A., & Leite, N. (2024). Uma Análise Comparativa da Ciência Aberta, do Acesso Aberto e da Circulação de Conhecimento na América Latina e na África: Relatório Preliminar Brasil. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10694976
Beigel, F., Gallardo, O., Gomez, M. S., & Prado, F. C. (2025). Publicación en acceso abierto y costos por Article Processing Charges (APC) en Argentina. Revue D’anthropologie Des Connaissances, 19(2). https://doi.org/10.4000/140pa
Beigel, F., & Montoya, V. (2025). Perceptions, défis et prises de positions concernant l’Article Processing Charges (APC) dans la publication scientifique : une enquête auprès des chercheur·e·s du CONICET en Argentine. Social Science Information, 64(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/05390184251351425
Terlizzi, M. S., Zukerfeld, M., & Beigel, F. (2025). Open access, “piracy” and Article Processing Charges (APC) in Argentina: an informed policy for the national research funding agency. https://doi.org/10.1590/0001-3765202520241184
Soto-Herrera, D. A., Beigel, F., & Pallares Delgado, C. O. (2025). Costos de publicación en acceso abierto bajo el modelo APC: Argentina y Colombia. https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.rib.v48n1e357790
What was this project about?
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.