APC waivers and Ukraine's publishing output in Gold OA journals: Evidence from five commercial publishers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Purpose This paper investigates the impact of 100 % article processing charge (APC) waivers introduced by the five largest commercial publishers – Elsevier, SAGE, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley – on the participation of Ukrainian researchers in fully Gold Open Access (OA) publishing during 2019–2024. It aims to assess whether the temporary removal of financial barriers during wartime led to measurable changes in Ukraine’s OA publication activity. Design/methodology/approach Bibliometric data were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection, focusing exclusively on fully Gold OA journals published by the five selected publishers. The analysis covers Ukrainian-affiliated papers published between 2019 and 2024, examining annual publication dynamics, publisher-specific distributions, disciplinary profiles, and cross-country comparisons with Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. Findings The number of Ukrainian-authored articles in the selected Gold OA journals increased sharply after 2022, rising by more than 50 % between 2022 and 2023. The strongest growth occurred in journals by Springer Nature and Elsevier and in medical and applied sciences. While the surge correlates with the introduction of full APC waivers, additional factors, such as international collaborations and targeted research funding, also contributed. Research limitations The study cannot verify waiver use at the individual article level, as publishers do not disclose this information. It relies on WoS metadata and excludes hybrid, diamond, and non-commercial OA journals. Consequently, results should be interpreted as indicative rather than definitive evidence of causal relationships. Practical implications The findings highlight that well-targeted publishing support, such as temporary APC waivers, can sustain scholarly visibility during crises. However, without institutional mediation, awareness campaigns, and broader investment in research capacity, such measures offer only partial solutions to systemic inequities in the APC-based publishing model. Originality/value This is the first empirical assessment of the wartime APC-waiver policies for Ukrainian researchers. By isolating a unique natural experiment involving five global publishers, the study contributes new evidence to discussions on equity, resilience, and sustainability in Open Access publishing under crisis conditions.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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".