APC waivers and Ukraine's publishing output in Gold OA journals: Evidence from five commercial publishers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines the effect of article processing charge (APC) waivers on the participation of Ukrainian researchers in fully Gold Open Access (Gold OA) journals published by the five largest academic publishers - Elsevier, SAGE, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley - during the period 2019-2024. These publishers were selected because, in response to the full-scale war launched against Ukraine in 2022, all five introduced emergency 100% APC-waiver policies for Ukrainian authors. Using bibliometric data from the Web of Science Core Collection, the study analyses publication trends in Ukrainian-authored articles in fully Gold OA journals of these publishers before and after 2022. The results show a marked post-2022 increase in Ukraine's Gold OA output, particularly in journals published by Springer Nature and Elsevier. Disciplinary and publisher-specific patterns are evident, with especially strong growth in the medical and applied sciences. The findings underscore the potential of targeted support measures during times of crisis, while also illustrating the inherent limitations of APC-based publishing models in fostering equitable scholarly communication.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.062 | 0.052 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.012 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".