Open access perpetuates differences between higher- and lower-income countries

Abstract

When a group of concerned scientists initiated the Open Access (OA) movement in 2001 with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (https://www.budap estopenaccessinitiative.org), their primary objective was to facilitate free and universal access to scientific articles through the elimination of readers’ subscription fees. For authors, the increased visibility and impact associated with OA papers came at the expense of high publication costs. Twenty years later, the number of OA science journals has skyrocketed (Piwowar et al. 2018), including those focused on ecological research. Now, many traditional ecology journals (those that have not become fully OA) offer OA options as hybrid journals, and funding agencies help cover the publication fees associated with OA (referred to as article publication or processing charges), which may add up to several thousand dollars per paper.