Authors from the periphery countries choose open access more often

This article analyses attitudes of academic authors toward open access (OA) and the frequency of choosing OA publication venues. The research looks particularly at differences between authors based in countries with a gross domestic product per capita less or greater than US$18,000 (called periphery and core countries, respectively). The data were obtained with an online survey sent to 107,296 scholars listed on the mailing lists belonging to De Gruyter Open from December 2015 to January 2016. A total of 1,012 responses were received. Authors from the periphery countries publish their articles in gold OA more often and they also pay OA publication fees equally often as those based in the core countries. The reasons for that are complex, involving both their preference to publish in OA and the composition of the publishing market in the periphery.


INTRODUCTION
Academic research might be seen as a centralized environment with a very clearly distinguished and geographically separated core and a periphery. Eugene Garfield, the impact factor's inventor, claimed in 1983 that 'Western journals control the flow of international scientific communication almost as much as Western news agencies monopolize international news' (Garfield, 1983, following Guédon, 2008. More recently Jean-Claude Guédon discussed the existence of arbitrary formulated 'mainstream' of academic research. He claimed that in an 'international competition' every scholar in the world is judged on the basis of his/her contribution to the 'mainstream' (Guédon, 2008). In the same article, Guédon applied a global 'core-periphery' division to an analysis of academic research environment, arguing that contributing to the 'mainstream' is more difficult for those from outside of the core countries. He suggested that open access (OA) journals can be expected to cross the division between researchers working in centre and their colleagues in the periphery by bringing more visibility to works of the latter. This article aims to shed more light on the problem of actual publishing behaviours of authors from both the core and the peripheral countries.
The 'core-periphery' division originates from the dependency theory and has been developed by the world system theory. Both of these theories indicate that the global core is specialized in capital-intensive, highly monopolized production, which is profitable, whereas the global periphery produces mostly labourintensive goods that are sold in competitive markets, which limits their potential profits (Schortman & Urban, 1992).
Analysing academic research from the perspective of world system seems to be a promising approach. Research institutions need skilled labour, which is expensive to train and requires costly equipment, especially in Life and Physical Sciences (the Large Hadron Collider being an example of an ultra-expensive research facility). Academic research is concentrated in the same places of the world as highly profitable, monopolized production. According to the World Bank Data on scientific and technical journal articles (http://data. worldbank.org/indicator/IP.JRN.ARTC.SC), a country's publishing output per million people correlates very strongly with gross domestic product (GDP) per capita (Spearman coefficient of 0.84!). Gini coefficient for publishing output per capita is higher than for GDP, thus the contribution to the scientific 'mainstream' is even more unequally distributed among countries than GDP. What is more, control on the rules of the more remunerative than peripheral type activities, it should be possible to use gross national product (GNP) per capita as a proxy for the level of core activity in the productive mix of an economy' (Babones, 2015).
Based on the World Bank data, I assumed that periphery countries are those with current GDP per capita less than or equal to US$18,000 in 2015, whereas core countries are those with GDP above this (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY. GDP.PCAP.CD). Resulting division of the world is quite similar to that obtained by world-system researchers including Babones (2015).
Other types of division of countries into core and periphery might also be applied with similar results. A total of 82.5% of article authors from the periphery countries have at least one gold OA paper in their portfolio, which is true only for 63.7% of their colleagues based in the core countries.
The average researcher from the core countries published 20% of her/his recent articles in gold OA (median), whereas the median for authors from the periphery is 46%. For the whole sample, the median is 33.3% (Figs 1 and 2).
I have divided respondents into three groups based on their declarationsstudents (graduate and undergraduate), early career researchers (ECRs), and established researchers (Table 3).
While in the periphery those who declared themselves as ECRs are those with the highest median of gold OA share of recent article output (N = 66), the median for their colleagues in the core countries is close to zero (N = 112). The ECRs are the authors under the greatest pressure from the rules of academic promotion. This may suggest that this pressure has opposite effects in the global core than in the periphery. In the periphery, ECRs tend to publish more than others in OA, while in the core, the same group publishes less.
Importantly, peripheral authors have no preference for green OA. The survey contained a question about number of works submitted to OA repositories and I found no evidence that researchers from the peripheral countries use OA repositories more than the others. In core countries, 34.5% of article authors used an OA repository in recent 3 years, and 29.7% did it in periphery.
To publish an article in gold OA, authors have to choose an OA journal (or at least a hybrid one). Thus share of gold OA  that 'OA makes it easier to promote an academic work'. Authors from the global periphery are even more likely to accept both the promotional advantage and the citation advantage of OA (in both cases the median is 'Strongly agree' for authors from the periphery and 'Agree' for those from the core). More authors from the periphery countries also feel that they are under pressure from colleagues or supervisors to publish in OA (median for the researchers from the core countries is 'Disagree', while for researchers from the periphery the median is in the centre of the scale -'Neither agree nor disagree'). Yet only perceived pressure FIGURE 1 Authors who published at least one work of a given type in recent 3 years, in percentages of all academic authors in the core.   Perceived citation advantage and promotional advantage of OA seems to correlate only moderately with importance of OA as a factor for choosing a journal to publish work in and is not directly linked to actual publishing behaviours.
Respondents were asked in the survey if they agree to grant their readers the right to translate their work, include it in an anthology, mine by software in search for text and data or republish with a commercial company. Surprisingly, the majority of respondents refused to grant any of these rights to their readers.
Yet authors from the global periphery are more likely to accept readers' rights to reuse, which is granted by liberal licensing that dominates OA publishing.
Lack of acceptance of reusage rights is surprising (Table 4), because all of these rights are granted to readers, without additional approval, on the basis of Creative Commons Attribution License, which is the most popular license among journals indexed by Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ, https://doaj.org/). Therefore, majority of OA authors should feel comfortable with itbut apparently they do not. Yet authors from the global periphery are more likely to accept conditions of liberal licensing.
Authors from the periphery countries seem to exhibit generally more positive attitudes towards OA publishing than their colleagues from more wealthy regions. However, differences in beliefs does not explain the huge difference in share of gold OA works in all works published by respondents from the periphery and the core. The main factors that shape publishing behaviours of all authors are well established, arbitrary criteria of quality, such as impact factor and abstracting and indexing services. Researchers try to balance them with chances of getting a particular work published in a given venue. The most possible explanation of the observed difference in publishing output is that, for various reasons, researchers from the periphery countries tend to publish in their 'local' journals, which are OA for supply-side reasons. This hypothetical explanation will be expanded in the 'Discussion' section.

Article processing charges
The majority of journals indexed in DOAJ do not charge authors for publication, although this funding model has been popularized by very successful journals operating mostly in biomedical sciences, such as PLoS ONE. A fee that is paid by an author or her/his funders to cover publication costs of an OA article is called article processing charge (APC). In all 21.2% of article authors from the periphery countries paid one or more APC in a given period. This is true for 18% of their colleagues from the core countries. This raises the question of how authors from less wealthy countries are able to find the money to pay publication fees. Respondents reported that they rely more on their own pockets than being able to obtain institutional or grant funds, which also makes paying APCs more problematic for them.
In all 61% of researchers from the periphery who paid an APC claimed that it was quite difficult or very difficult for them to organize money for this goal. The same is true for only 43.8% of authors from the core.
Researchers were also asked if they expect to have access to any funds, their own or external ones, that might be spent on funding OA publication fees. Authors working in the periphery countries are less likely to expect access to money from grants intended to be spent on publication costs (10.4% vs. 15.9%), and they are equally likely to predict that they will have grant money that might be spent on unspecified goal (10.4% vs. 11.3%). Yet 12.3% of authors from the peripheral countries are ready to treat their own money as a resource that may cover publication fees, which is true for only 5.7% of those based in the core countries.
Supplementing funding with their own money lets authors from less wealthy regions pay OA charges as often as their richer colleagues do.
However, balancing the lack of resources (and the fact of being based in a country with a lower GDP), it appears that the APCs paid by authors in the periphery countries are also lower than their counterparts in the core countries. The median of the most recent APCs paid by authors from the core is €1,100, whereas those from the less wealthy countries paid only €300. This may also demonstrate that researchers from the periphery target different journals than their colleagues from more wealthy countries.

DISCUSSION
Composition of what is considered as the 'mainstream' publication channels in global research is maintained by two privately held entities. The major one is Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate Analytics), based in USA, that publishes Web of Science and calculates impact factor. The second one is RELX Group operating Submitting works to journals based in the core countries might be also more difficult to researchers from the periphery.
One of the reasons might be that writing habits and conventions coming from their native languages might be treated by English native speakers as an evidence of their discursive incompetence (Canagarajah, 1996).
For authors from the global periphery present in the analysed sample, OA is the least important factor of choosing a journal to publish work in, while journal impact factor and abstracting services are the most important. These two factors favour 'mainstream' journals that are usually published in the core countries. However, if all factors are taken together there are forces that will lead peripheral authors to publish in their local journals, and for many of them OA venues appear to be the best option. This may also be because OA journals are simply more popular among peripheral researchers.
Indeed, the regional composition of journals indexed by DOAJ is quite surprising (Doaj.org, 2016). Among 9,160 journals indexed in DOAJ the biggest group comes from Brazil (9.6% of all). About 51.6% of all journals indexed by DOAJ are based in countries with GDP per capita less than or equal to US$18,000 in 2015 whereas only 43.2% come from regions with higher GDP (the others are from countries with no known GDP for 2015).
To understand the reasons that trigger the popularity of OA among journals based in the periphery, it is worth taking a closer look at the world's leader in number of journals indexed by DOAJ. In Brazil, and to lesser extent in other Latin American countries, the main factor behind the growth in OA journals has been SciELO. SciELO is an OA publishing platform and indexing service. It was started in the late 1990s as one of the world's first OA publishing initiatives. SciELO has been launched as a cooperation of two non-governmental organizations, but as early as 2002 it received support from the Brazilian governmental agency, CNPq, which was subsequently joined by other governmental bodies from various Latin American countries. In 2013, SciELO was indexing 1,000 journal titles that publish more than 40,000 articles per year (Packer, Cop, Luccisano, Ramalho, & Spinak, 2014). As a result, no other region in the world has this level of adoption of OA journals indexed internationally (Miguel, Chinchilla-Rodriguez, & de Moya-Anegón, 2011, following Packer et al., 2014. From the very beginning, SciELO was conceived as a project to overcome very weak presence of Latin American journals in the international indexes.
Another example of a peripheral country that has a strong position in DOAJ is Poland, from where 4.2% of all indexed journals come from. Polish publishers were able to introduce almost half as many journals as the much larger Brazil. According to report, 'Open Science in Poland 2014. A Diagnosis', 49.2% of academic journals published in Poland are open access. This is because the Polish journal market relies mostly on direct public subsidies, which are a more important source of funding for the majority of journals than subscriptions or publication fees. The main factor that opened Polish journals was a governmental programme that offered additional subsidies to OA journals only.
This has resulted in opening both new and well established Polish journals. The OA journals are well represented among the best titles published in Poland. Therefore, opening research communication in Poland might be seen as a political decision on a governmental level, which was easy to execute in a publishing environment that has been dependent on direct public subventions (Leśniak et al., 2015).
The examples of Brazil and Poland suggest that in the periphery journals are opening thanks to public engagement in academic publishing. This might be seen as a conscious political strategy, aimed at diminishing the handicap of local journals on the competitive global market. However, this strategy is unlikely to take place in the global core countries, where the most important journals are privately held, and do not rely on direct public subsides (while their customers are mostly public institutions). In the periphery, where commercial publishers are less developed due to limited profits available, the majority of journals are owned by academic societies and universities and are run as non-profit initiatives, often relying on public money.
In this context, it is interesting that authors from the periphery in the analysed sample pay APCs at least as often as those from the core countries. It suggests that even if public engagement is a main force behind the shift towards OA in the periphery, it does not exclude the possibility of development of the APC market there. However, the so-called author-pays model is not the most popular neither for works published in the periphery, nor in the core countries.
Some additional analysis of local publishing markets in both peripheral and core countries should be conducted to check if they meet the pattern presented above. However, this exceeds the goals of this article.

CONCLUSION
Authors from the periphery countries publish their articles in gold OA more often. The reasons for this fact are complex, involving both their higher preference to publish in OA and the composition of publishing market in the periphery. The majority of OA serials indexed by the DOAJ are based in the periphery countries. In Poland and Brazil, two periphery countries with high number of OA journals, public involvement is a major force behind the shift of publishing to OA. Whether it is true for other peripheral countries is yet to be confirmed. Questions about goals and effects of public strategies supporting OA might be asked in future studies.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The study was conducted with resources provided by De Gruyter Open.