Who’s writing open access (OA) articles? Characteristics of OA authors at Ph.D.-granting institutions in the United States

The open access (OA) publication movement aims to present research literature to the public at no cost and with no restrictions. While the democratization of access to scholarly literature is a primary focus of the movement, it remains unclear whether OA has uniformly democratized the corpus of freely available research, or whether authors who choose to publish in OA venues represent a particular subset of scholars—those with access to resources enabling them to afford article processing charges (APCs). We investigated the number of OA articles with article processing charges (APC OA) authored by 182,320 scholars with known demographic and institutional characteristics at American research universities across 11 broad fields of study. The results show, in general, that the likelihood for a scholar to author an APC OA article increases with male gender, employment at a prestigious institution (AAU member universities), association with a STEM discipline, greater federal research funding, and more advanced career stage (i.e., higher professorial rank). Participation in APC OA publishing appears to be skewed toward scholars with greater access to resources and job securit

Project raw data (anonymized) from Academic Analytics

Project raw data (anonymized) from Academic Analytic

R script with raw results and output tables and figures

R script with raw results and output tables and figure

Report

AARC Middle East Collaboration Repor

EPSCoR Research Outputs

Please see associated preprint: https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/r6xdu. Some states in the U.S. have traditionally received less federal research funding than other states. The National Science Foundation (NSF) created a program in 1979, called the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) to enhance the research competitiveness in such EPSCoR states. While it is well established that the EPSCoR states receive significantly less federal research funding than non-EPSCoR states, the overall impact of federal funding on research performance of EPSCoR and non-EPSCoR has not been previously studied. In the current study, we compared the combined research productivity of Ph.D. granting institutions in EPSCoR versus the non-EPSCoR states to better understand the scientific impact of the federal investments in sponsored research across all states. The research outputs we measured included journal articles and books published, citations of journal articles, presentations at scientific conferences, and patents. Unsurprisingly, results indicated that the non-EPSCoR states received significantly more federal research funding than their EPSCoR counterparts, which correlated with higher number of faculty members in the non-EPSCoR vs EPSCoR states. Also, in the overall research productivity expressed on per capita basis, the non-EPSCoR states fared better than EPSCoR states. However, when the research output was measured based on per $1M investment of federal research funding, EPSCoR states were found to perform significantly better than the non-EPSCoR states in all research productivity indicators except patents. Together, this study found preliminary evidence that EPSCoR states performed very well in overall research productivity despite receiving significantly fewer federal research dollars. Limitations and next steps of this study are discussed

Supplemental Data and Information

Supplemental tables associated with manuscrip

Population proportions and scholarly outputs by gender across disciplines and across professorial ranks

Investigations of faculty gender demographics are crucial for understanding potential biases in promotion practices and for ensuring a diverse learning environment that reflects the broader student population. This data can illuminate disparities in advancement and inform initiatives to cultivate a more equitable and inclusive academic community. National-level statistics recording population by gender across academic disciplines and professorial ranks are rare, and AARC believes this information should be made available to scholars. To this end, AARC scholars have posted gender ratios of faculty members in all 170+ academic disciplines in the Academic Analytics commercial database, and we’ve broken those numbers out by professorial rank (https://osf.io/uytf2/). Additionally, per capita scholarly activity is reported for each demographic group (journal articles published, books published, grants won, etc.). We hope the data tables are useful to scholars of the research enterprise, and that making this data publicly available contributes to the ongoing generative discourse around gender bias in the academy

Who’s writing open access (OA) articles? Characteristics of OA authors at Ph.D.-granting institutions in the United States

The open access (OA) publication movement aims to present research literature to the public at no cost and with no restrictions. While the democratization of access to scholarly literature is a primary focus of the movement, it remains unclear whether OA has uniformly democratized the corpus of freely available research, or whether authors who choose to publish in OA venues represent a particular subset of scholars—those with access to resources enabling them to afford article processing charges (APCs). We investigated the number of OA articles with article processing charges (APC OA) authored by 182,320 scholars with known demographic and institutional characteristics at American research universities across 11 broad fields of study. The results show, in general, that the likelihood for a scholar to author an APC OA article increases with male gender, employment at a prestigious institution (AAU member universities), association with a STEM discipline, greater federal research funding, and more advanced career stage (i.e., higher professorial rank). Participation in APC OA publishing appears to be skewed toward scholars with greater access to resources and job securit

The rhythms of scholarly publication

Data tables showing mean and median publishing rates in 170 disciplines, over various timeframes, and across professorial ranks. Data are derived from Academic Analytics LLC's commercial data warehouse of scholarly research at American Ph.D. granting universities (database version AAD2019-1740). Publishing data cover journal articles, conference proceedings, books, and chapters in edited volumes. Tables are available in PDF and Excel formats