Waiving Article Processing Charges for Least Developed Countries. A Brick Stone of a Large-scale Open Access Transformation
WWaiving Article Processing Charges for Least Developed Countries. A Brick Stone of a Large-scale Open Access Transformation
Niels Taubert (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2357-2648)Andre Bruns (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2976-0826) Christopher Lenke (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9232-4736) Graham Stone (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5189-373X)
Abstract
This article investigates the question, if it is economically feasible for a largepublishing house to waive article processing charges for the group of 47 so called leastdeveloped countries (LDC). As an example Springer-Nature is selected. The analysisis based on the Web of Science, OpenAPC and the Jisc collections Springer compactjournal list. As a result, it estimates an average yearly publication output of 520publications (or a share of 0.26% of the worldwide publication output in Springer-Nature journals) for the LDC country group. The loss of revenues for Springer-Naturewould be 1,1 million $ if a waiver would be applied for all of these countries. Giventhat money is indispensable for development in the case of LDC (e.g. life expectancy,health, education), it is not only desirable but also possible in economic terms for apublisher like Springer-Nature to waive APCs for these countries without much loss inrevenues.
I. Introduction
In recent years a number of funding organizations and research councils have started to support alarge-scale transformation towards gold open access (OA) that is based on article processing charges(APC). National-wide OA-contracts were negotiated for Austria, Finland, Hungary, Germany, theNetherlands, Norway, Poland, Qatar, Sweden and the UK. The transformation of the publicationenvironment from a subscription-based towards APC-based financial model is undoubtedly complexand bears some risks for all parties involved. In common with a publication market based onsubscriptions; the APC-model comes with some challenges that protagonists must respond to. Amajor problem of the subscription model has been the limited access to scientific information,especially at locations where funds are scarce and perpetually increasing prices result in a library orserials crisis. In an APC-based environment, different challenges such as questionable publicationpractices (Bohannon 2013), double-dipping (Prosser 2015, Pinfield et al. 2017) and a redistribution offinancial burdens of the publication system (e.g. Smith et al 2016) arose and were solved at least inpart.One aspect that recurrently comes up in the political discussion about open access is the question onhow to deal with APC in the case of countries in the so-called Global South. It is likely that many donot have enough public funds for research to cover the costs for APC or have other priorities thanestablishing structures and workflows for the organization of payments for APC. If a large-scaletransformation towards APC-based OA would occur on a global level, the risk is that the patterns ofexclusion might change. In a subscription-based publication environment, readers in countries of the nd lobal South tend to be excluded from access to published research because of paywalls and lack ofpublic funds for subscriptions. In a gold open access environment based on APC, authors fromcountries of the Global South might be excluded because of lack of funds for publishing. Somepublishers have already responded to that challenge by waiving APC in some of their journals forreprint (RP) authors coming from such countries. Given that waivers are usually applied to full OAjournals and given that hybrid OA journals are excluded, current models do not provide acomprehensive solution from countries of the Global South. This article analyzes the possibility of a waiver of APC for countries of the Global South from anempirical perspective, focusing on one of the large publishing houses: Springer-Nature. It estimateshow many publications would be affected if Springer-Nature decided to waive APC in all of theirjournals as well as the loss of revenues that would result from such a step.The identification of countries as ‘poor’ and notions like ‘Global South’ bear normative implicationsand the act of attributing such classifications may be contested, undesired and may ill reflect the self-image of these states. An analysis like this can hardly escape this problem as it necessarily must drawon some kind of classification to identify countries where a waiver of APC would be reasonable. Forthe purpose of this study the country classification of ‘least developed countries’ (LDC) seems to besuitable. LDC is a country classification applied by the Committee for Development Policy (CDP) ofthe United Nations (UN). Unlike the World Bank classification of countries into low, lower-middle,upper-middle and high income countries, that is an obvious alternative, the LDC classification is notbased on one (economic) criterion only but on a combination of three: Income, human assets index,and economic vulnerability index. A recommendation for inclusion takes place if a country does notmeet a certain threshold in one of the three criteria, a graduation takes place if a country falls below ahigher threshold of two of the three criteria. Income is defined as gross national income per capita andan inclusion in the LDC requires a three-year average lower than $1,025. The Human Assets Index(HAI) is a composite index including the health indicators ‘under-five mortality rate’, ‘percentage ofpopulation undernourished’, ‘maternal mortality ratio’ and the two education indicators ‘grosssecondary school enrolment ratio’ and ‘adult literacy rate’. The economic vulnerability index is also acomposite index that intends to measure structural vulnerability to economic and environmentalshocks and is composed of eight indicators. In 2013 0.7% of global researchers were located in LDCand were involved in 0.6% of the worldwide publication output (UNESCO 2015). The most recentLDC list with 47 countries published in 2018 is used for this study. II. Literature Review
Besides its relevance in a political and bargaining context, this article contributes to a growing field ofstudies that aim to analyze the current transformation process towards Gold OA publishing based on nd nd nd PC (Solomon and Björk 2012, Björk and Solomon 2015). Their goal is to understand both thedynamics of the market and the economics of the publishing model.By no means all journals providing immediate OA charge an APC. Journals that do not chargepublication fees are sometimes called platinum (Wilson 2007) or diamond OA (Fuchs and Sandoval2013). Firstly, at the global level, Morrison et al. (2015) find that more than two thirds of the journalsincluded in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) apply publication fees. The application ofAPC seems to differ by field (Crawford 2017). For example, for medicine two thirds of the journalsrefrain to impose APC (Asai 2019). In addition, the take-up of APC also varies by region. A largeshare of OA journals not charging APC can be found in Latin America, the Middle East, and EasternEurope (Crawford 2017). They are financed by other means, such as subsidies from the state as in thecase of Brazil (Appel and Albagli 2019) or they are driven by the voluntary and unpaid work ofdedicated scientists.Second, a number of studies are interested in the dynamics of the transformation to OA and address towhat extent the publication output of an entity of a research system (e.g. institutions, countries,disciplines) is freely available online via the formal communication channel. Studies differ withregard to the databases and the sources of OA information being used as well as the definition of OAtypes, (Martín-Martín et al. 2018) but, nevertheless, there is some evidence that can be found across allcontributions: The share of publications that are freely available online in the formal communicationchannel has reached a level that can hardly be overlooked and that today contributes to the supply ofinformation within many fields of the sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. In addition, thedynamics of growth of the Gold OA share still sustains.A third set of studies is interested in the price for publishing in an APC environment. Because of thelack of other data, early studies referred to list prices on publishers’ websites (Morrison et al. 2015) orto prices as recorded by DOAJ (Björk and Solomon 2015). Given that the amount of money that isactually paid for APC can differ from list prices, and given that payments for articles published in thesame journal may also vary, more recent studies are based on collections of actual payments (Jahn andTullney 2016). Five results of the APC prices/payment studies seem to be worth highlighting: Theaverage price/payment reported different studies varies at a similar scale between €905 (Asai 2019)and €1,479 (Pieper and Broschinski 2018). All studies report large standard deviation indicating thatthere is much variance in the pricing of APC. In addition, there is some evidence that APCs are higherfor hybrid journals than for full open access journals and that APC varies by discipline, (Solomon andBjörk 2016) type of publisher (Asai 2019), quality (Björk and Solomon 2015) and language of thejournal (Asai 2019).A fourth tier of studies investigate the financial effects of an ongoing OA transformation on the levelof institutions showing that the transformation towards an APC model might overburden the librarybudget of research-intensive universities (Solomon and Björk 2016, Taubert 2019). III. Research Question
The aim of this analysis is to investigate the financial consequences of waiving APC for authors fromthe Global South. Without any doubt, such a move would help the publisher`s reputation within thescientific community and might be an option worth considering. However, costs in terms of loss ofrevenue must be clear to the publisher from the outset. https://doaj.org/ (accessed on July 2 nd Laakso et al. 2011, Gargouri et al. 2012, Archambault et al. 2014, Crawford 2015, Wohlgemuth et al. 2017,Piwowar et al. 2018, Abediyarandi and Mayr 2019, Hobert et al. 2020. Pinfield et al. 2016, Jahn and Tullney 2016, Schönfelder 2020. his article answers this question for Springer-Nature journals covered by the UK Springer CompactAgreement. Springer-Nature was chosen as it is one of the largest publishing houses worldwide with astrong engagement in OA publishing. The UK Agreement was selected as a case as it collects themajority of Springer’s journals that apply a hybrid open access model and are of strategic importancefor a transformation towards APC-based OA. The Springer Compact Agreement 2016–2018 includes1,997 Springer-Nature journals, covering all fields in the sciences, social sciences and humanities andallows all members of participating institutions to publish their articles OA.The empirical analysis is organized in two steps. In order to determine the volume of revenues forSpringer-Nature in a possible future APC-based publication market, the distribution of reprint (RP)authors, sometimes also called ‘corresponding authors’, in all journals covered by the SpringerCompact Agreement is analyzed by country. Identifying the RP author of a publication is important ineconomic terms as it is assumed that the RP authors’ institution should pay for the publication in anAPC-based publication market. After an overview of the worldwide distributions, the numbers ofpublications with RP authors (in what follows: ‘RP publications’) is calculated for the LDC countrygroup, as well as for each individual country. In addition, estimations of potential losses of revenuesare reported. IV. Methods
Data Sources
The analysis makes use of three data sources: Jisc Collections Springer Compact 2016-2018 : a list containing Springer-Nature journals wasused to identify the relevant set of publications for this study. Publication database : publication data and reprint author information were taken from theWeb of Science (WoS). Raw data from WoS were provided by the Competence Centre forBibliometrics. The processed raw database in its version of February 26 th APC cost information : In order to obtain the costs for APCs that were actually paid byinstitutions the OpenAPC dataset was used. It is the largest collection of APC paymentinformation from various countries. OpenAPC was also used for an estimation of thenumber of publications not covered by WoS and the calculation of a correction factor.
Data analysis
As a first step, a table with all article-address-combination was created for all citable items in journalsof the Jisc Collections Springer Compact 2016–2018 list. ‘Citable items’ include the publication types‘article’, ‘review’, and ‘proceedings paper’ for which APC are usually paid (Bruns et al. 2019). Thetime span covers publications from 2016 to 2018. Electronic and print ISSN was used for matchingthe Springer Compact list with WoS.The second step was to calculate the number of RP publications for each country (the table wasenriched with additional country information). In cases in which a publication had more than one nd nd http://help.incites.clarivate.com/incitesLiveJCR/9607-TRS (accessed on July 2 nd eprint author from different countries, the publication was counted for each country so as not tounderestimate the number of publications for a possible waiver. Finally, loss of revenue for Springer-Nature as a consequence of waiving APC were calculated for LDC as well as for each country in thecategories. V. Results
Overview
What would a publication market based on APC look like and from which country would the bulk ofrevenues for Springer-Nature come from? An overview of the worldwide distribution of RPpublications by country is given below. Graph 1 shows a scatter plot of the distribution of allcountries worldwide ordered by the gross national income in million $ and the number of publicationsin the period 2016–2018 with a reprint author from that country. The two countries with the largestpublication output in Springer-Nature journals, China and the United States with 88,278 and 65,376RP publications respectively, were excluded for better visualization. The distribution already indicatesthat there are a relatively small number of countries with a strong RP publication record where thelion’s share of Springers-Nature’s income would come from. The group of least developed countriescan hardly be detected in the lower left corner as their gross national income and their number of RPpublications in 2018 are both small.
Figure 1: Countries with < 50,000 RP publications between 2016 – Graph 2 zooms in and plots countries with an RP publication output of less than 500, which makes thegroup of the least developed countries visible. With the exception of Bangladesh and Ethiopia thenumber of RP publications is smaller than 100, thus indicating that this group does not currentlycontribute much to an APC-based publication market. In addition, it is interesting to note that aconsiderable number of these countries have an RP publication output of less than five publications. GermanyIndiaJapanItalyIranKoreaUK , , , , , , G N I i n ( i n m illi on $ ) no. of RP publications in 2016-2018 Least developed countries Other countriesFitted values
Countries with < 50,000 RP publications between 2016-2018, by GNI igure 2:
Countries with < 500 RP publications between 2016 – Graph 3 orders countries again by number of RP publications in the period 2016–2018 but now byGNI by capita. Two results seem to be worth noting: First, there are countries with a strong RPpublication record but with a relatively low GNI per capita. The most prominent example is Indiawith a GNI per capita of $2,020 in 2018. Second, there are some countries with a very high GNI percapita with little or no publication output. Examples are Macao, Luxembourg, Hong Kong or TheBahamas.
Figure 3: Countries with < 50,000 RP publications between 2016 – Again, the group of LDC can be hardly detected in the graph. The zoom (graph 4) shows that the GNIper capita is far below $5,000 for most of the LDC group with the exception of Tuvalu. The two BangladeshEthiopia , , , , , , G N I i n ( i n m illi on $ ) RP publications in 2016-2018
Least developed countries Other countriesFitted values
Countries with < 500 RP publications between 2016-2018, by GNI
GermanyIndiaJapanItalyKoreaUKFranceBrasilCanadaSpainSwitzerlandNorwayMacao , , , , G N I pe r c ap i t a i n i n $ RP publications in 2016-2018
Least developed countries Other countriesFitted values
Countries with > 50,000 RP publications between 2016-2018, by GNI p.c. ountries with the strongest publication output in the LDC group both have a low GNI per capita($1,750 in the case of Bangladesh and $750 in the case of Ethiopia).Figure 4:
Countries with < 500 RP publications between 2016 – Correction Factors
The analysis of the number of RP publications by country based on WoS provides a good overview ofthe relative share of all countries in a Gold OA publication market, when APCs are applied. When itcomes to the calculation of financial effects of a possible waiver for APC, two shortcomings of thedata should be considered: The incomplete coverage of Jisc Collections Springer Compact journals inWoS and the incompleteness of reprint information. In order to overcome both shortcomings and tocome to a qualified estimation of possible financial effects, two correction factors are calculated.
Incomplete coverage of Jisc Collections Springer Compact list in WoS : WoS covers more than 24,000journals but is not exhaustive. The matching of the Springer Compact list with WoS revealed thatonly 1,446 of the 1,997 journals were indexed in WoS. In other words, 551 journals or a share of 28%are not covered. Given that journals differ regarding the number of citable items published, the shareof journals is not an adequate correction factor. Therefore, a different approach is undertaken. For UKinstitutions, the OpenAPC data set comprises all expenditures for APC, including those of the Springeragreement. For this set of publications, the period 2016–2018 was analyzed in order to calculate towhat extent they are covered by WoS. The correction factor is simply the ratio of all UK publicationsin journals of the Jisc Collections Springer Compact list and the number of them covered by WoS.
Table 1: Number of UK publications in Springer Hybrid Journals in- and outside WoS (Source:OpenAPC, period 2016 – No. of RP publications fromUK in Springer Hybrid OAjournals No. of them covered by WoS No. of them not covered by WoS Correctionfactor
Reprint Information in WoS : Reprint information of a publication can sometimes be problematic. Onthe one hand, there are a number of publications with more than one reprint address. In the analysis a BangladeshEthiopia , , , , G N I pe r c ap i t a i n i n $ RP publications in 2016-2018
Least developed countries Other countriesFitted values
Countries with < 500 RP publications between 2016-2018, by GNI p.c. ragmatic solution was followed, and all publications were fully counted for all countries involved.This was to counterbalance the number of publications where RP information is missing. In order toconsider these publications, the ratio between all publications and those with RP information wascalculated as a correction factor.
Table 2: Number of publications in Springer Hybrid Open Choice Journals covered by WoS: All, withand without RP information (period 2016 – No. of publications inSpringer Hybrid OA journals No. of them with RP information No. of them without RP information Correctionfactor
RP publication output of least developed countries
The results of the analysis for the group of least developed countries are given in table 3. The column‘RP pub. all’ reports the number of publications of reprint authors from a particular country for theperiod 2016–2018 in WoS, followed by three columns that break down the number to individual years.Column ‘RP pub av.’ contains the arithmetic mean of the three years and column ‘RP pub. av. corr.’multiplies the arithmetic mean with the two correction factors and can be regarded as a qualifiedestimation of the overall RP publication output of a country or country group in Jisc CollectionsSpringer Compact journals. The column ‘Loss of rev.’ calculates the losses of revenues for Springer-Nature in the case that the publisher decides to waive APC for the particular country. It is based onthe ‘RP pub. av corr.’ multiplied by the average amount of APC paid by UK institutions for Springerhybrid journals in 2018. This amount is €2,200 (Marques and Stone 2020). able 3: Least developed countries, number of publications with RP author (2016 – Country ISO3code GNI p.c2018 RPpub. all RPpub.2018 RPpub.2017 RPpub.2016 RPpub. av. RP pub.av.corr. Loss of rev.
Bangladesh BGD 1,750 384 145 138 101 128.0 169.7 373,290Ethiopia ETH 790 200 90 69 41 66.7 88.4 194,422Nepal NPL 970 68 20 28 20 22.7 30.0 66,104Uganda UGA 620 62 29 15 18 20.7 27.4 60,271Tanzania TZA 1,020 59 16 24 19 19.7 26.1 57,355Benin BEN 870 56 18 21 17 18.7 24.7 54,438Senegal SEN 1,410 47 14 12 21 15.7 20.8 45,689Burkina Faso BFA 670 32 13 12 7 10.7 14.1 31,108Yemen, Rep. YEM NA 30 13 8 9 10.0 13.3 29,163Zambia ZMB 1,430 28 10 10 8 9.3 12.4 27,219Rwanda RWA 780 25 10 5 10 8.3 11.0 24,303Sudan SDN 1,560 25 8 9 8 8.3 11.0 24,303Malawi MWI 360 23 8 8 7 7.7 10.2 22,359Mozambique MOZ 460 18 8 6 4 6.0 8.0 17,498Madagascar MDG 510 16 4 8 4 5.3 7.1 15,554Niger NER 390 16 10 2 4 5.3 7.1 15,554Congo, Dem. COD 490 13 4 3 6 4.3 5.7 12,637Mali MLI 840 13 5 4 4 4.3 5.7 12,637Cambodia KHM 1,390 11 4 4 3 3.7 4.9 10,693Vanuatu VUT 3,130 9 2 4 3 3.0 4.0 8,749Togo TGO 660 5 3 2 0 1.7 2.2 4,861Burundi BDI 280 5 5 0 0 1.7 2.2 4,861Lao PDR LAO 2,450 4 0 2 2 1.3 1.8 3,888Myanmar MMR 1,310 4 3 0 1 1.3 1.8 3,888Guinea GIN 850 3 1 2 0 1.0 1.3 2,916Bhutan BTN 2,970 2 1 0 1 0.7 0.9 1,944Angola AGO 3,370 2 1 0 1 0.7 0.9 1,944Mauritania MRT 1,160 2 0 0 2 0.7 0.9 1,944Lesotho LSO 1,390 2 1 0 1 0.7 0.9 1,944Gambia, The GMB 710 2 1 1 0 0.7 0.9 1,944Guinea-Bissau GNB 750 2 0 2 0 0.7 0.9 1,944Sierra Leone SLE 490 2 0 1 1 0.7 0.9 1,944Solomon Isl. SLB 2,020 1 0 0 1 0.3 0.4 972Eritrea ERI NA 1 1 0 0 0.3 0.4 972Afghanistan AFG 550 1 0 1 0 0.3 0.4 972Somalia SOM NA 1 1 0 0 0.3 0.4 972Liberia LBR 610 1 1 0 0 0.3 0.4 972Chad TCD 670 1 0 0 1 0.3 0.4 972Djibouti DJI 3,190 0 0 0 0 0.0 0.0 0Tuvalu TUV 5,430 0 0 0 0 0.0 0.0 0Cent. Afric. Rep. CAF 490 0 0 0 0 0.0 0.0 0Timor-Leste TLS 1,820 0 0 0 0 0.0 0.0 0South Sudan SSD NA 0 0 0 0 0.0 0.0 0Sao Tome STP 1,890 0 0 0 0 0.0 0.0 0Kiribati KIR 3,140 0 0 0 0 0.0 0.0 0Comoros COM 1,380 0 0 0 0 0.0 0.0 0Haiti HTI 800 0 0 0 0 0.0 0.0 0
SUM 1,176 450 401 325 392.0 519.6 1,143,202
An important question regarding the publication output is whether there are typical subjects and fieldsin which reprint authors from the LDC group publish. The WoS provides a subject classification thatattributes each journal and all of their publications to one (or more) of 256 subjects.
LDC publication output, by WoS categories
Before the main characteristics of the distribution are described, two methodical remarks should bemade. First, RP authors from LDC publish in a large variety of different WoS categories. Therefore,subject categories with an output below a threshold of 50 publications were summarized in thecategory ‘other’. Second, journals can be assigned to more than one of the WoS categories. Therefore,the cumulated number of all subject categories is larger than the number of publications reported in theprevious sections.A look into the distribution reveals that large fractions of the publication output appear to refer tosocietal conditions, problems and challenges of LDCs. For example, in the subjects ‘agriculture’,‘agronomy’, ‘plant science’, ‘water resources’, and ‘veterinary science’ that are relevant for theproduction and supply of food, and also for ‘environmental science’, ‘geoscience’, and ‘forestry’ thatmay study environmental conditions (and changes of these). This distribution indicates that large partsof the research of RP authors from LDC address major societal conditions and provide knowledge ofhigh practical relevance.
VI. Discussion
This article provides an analysis for the RP publication output of the period 2016–2018 in Springer-Nature journals for the LDC group and for all individual countries within these groups. Given that, onthe one hand, the worldwide differences in terms of income are striking and, on the other hand,research and academic publishing are extremely costly activities, the empirical results and thecomparisons suggested by this study tend to be absurd. In particular, two empirical results of thestudy are worth highlighting: First, it turned out that both the RP publication output in WoS and the estimated overall publicationoutput (in journals in WoS and not in WoS) are low for LDC, when compared with the worldwidepublication output.
Table 4: LDC, GNI and RP publications
Country group Av. GNI p. c.pper country RP pub. av. RP pub. av. corr Share of worldwide RP pub.
LDC $1,345
50 59 61 62 65656777941961,146PHYSICS, APPLIED GEOSCIENCES, MULTI.ENGIN., ELECTRICAL & ELECTRON. WATER RESOURCESVETERINARY SCIENCES AGRICULTURE, DAIRY & ANIMALFORESTRY PLANT SCIENCESAGRONOMY ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCESOTHER
LDC, WoS subject categories, 2016-2018, > 49 times n addition, a skewed publication output is not only be found when comparing countries on aworldwide level but also within the LDC group as Ethiopia’s and Bangladesh’s share sum up to 50%of the overall publication output of LDC.Second, the relation of the average costs that are actually paid for a publication in a journal of theSpringer Compact list and the average GNI per capita is remarkable. An APC for a single article ismuch higher than the average income per year of a citizen in an LDC.Regarding the request for a waiver for APC, the following conclusions can be drawn: The share of RPpublications of LDC is low in journals of the Jisc Collections Springer Compact list. It wouldtherefore be possible in economic terms for a publisher like Springer-Nature to waive APCs for thesecountries without much loss in revenue. Given that money is indispensable for development in thecase of LDC (e.g. life expectancy, health, education), it is also desirable that public funds in thesecountries would not be spent on APC. This particularly applies against the background of the analysisof the subject categories, suggesting that large parts of the publication output are of high societalrelevance for LDC. The costs for publications should therefore be covered by other means. Not all publishers’ portfolios are identical and those that specialize in some of the disciplines listedabove might see a disproportionate revenue loss. In this case there are various alternative strategiesthat could be employed based on the particular data set. For example, possible strategies could includethe exclusion of certain countries from the waiver, exclusion of certain disciplines, a possible APCdiscount instead of a full waiver or the number of RP publications, beginning with the country with thelargest number. A further model could be for high income countries to cover some of the costs ofwaivers or reductions. However, it is recognized that some if not all of these scenarios may not bewelcomed by the countries in question and this view needs to be balanced against the desire totransition to a fairer open access model.Whatever the model adopted, waivers and reductions should apply as an automatic procedure andshould not require any kind of application by the author. The number of RP publications would needto be monitored to establish a trustful relation between the country and the publisher and to avoid freeriding of authors from other countries. OpenAPC is well placed to collate this data on an annual basisand to make it openly available for scrutiny and further analysis. Ultimately, an APC fee waiver foran LDC country would be a temporary solution for as long as a particular country met the conditionsoutlined above.
VII. Conclusion
Waiving APCs for LDCs would be a means for publishers to improve their reputation within thescientific community and help them to be attributed as a socially responsible partner of science. In thepast, there have been examples of responsible actions of publishers. Besides a waiver for Low IncomeCountries (LIC) in a set of full OA journals, one may recall the provision of open access to relevantpublications in response to the outbreak of swine flu (H1N1) and the current Covid-19 pandemic as well as temporary access to relevant publications in the case of the Ebola crisis in a number of https://open-access.net/en/community/news/article/springer-offers-free-access-to-articles-on-swine-flu, (accessed on July 2 nd nd frican countries. The number of publications concerned was at a similar level as the annualpublication of LDC countries in Springer-Nature compact journals.The authors of this article would strongly encourage further empirical research in this area in order toensure a fair and equitable transition to open access for all countries. nd eferences Abediyarandi, Neda, and Philipp Mayr. ‘The State of Open Access in Germany: An Analysis of the Publication Output of German Universities’.
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