Can I Afford to Publish? A Dilemma for African Scholars
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Open-access publishing involves a business model where authors pay article processing charges, and subsequently, the article is freely available online. For African researchers, the shift to open access publishing flips the business model from a pay-wall model, where accessing literature is difficult, to a pay-to-play one, where it is difficult to publish. We explore costs of publishing in the 40 top ecology journals and the ability of African scholars to pay for open access. Three quarters of journals required payment for open-access publishing and the average cost was $3,150. Paying such fees would be a hardship for African scholars as grant funding is not available. Furthermore, it is not feasible for Africa scholars to pay the fees themselves as salaries are low. We encourage funders and publishers to facilitate a more equitable publishing realm where African scholars can see their research made available through open-access.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.109 | 0.330 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.044 | 0.065 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.026 |
| Research integrity | 0.022 | 0.022 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.013 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".