A research article published in ‘Learned Publishing’ analyses attitudes among authors towards article publishing charges (APCs) – given that the rise of open access publishing is moving the financial burden of scholarly journal publishing from libraries and readers to authors. The results revealed that APCs are perceived more as a global threat to science than a deterrent to personal professional careers. Younger academics and those in lower income level countries hold the most unfavourable opinions about the APC system, and researchers in Arts, Humanities and Social Science subjects hold more negative perceptions of APCs compared with those in STEM and the Life Sciences disciplines. Age and access to external funding were negative predictors of refusal to pay to publish, and commitment to open access self-archiving predicted the negative global perception of APCs. The authors concluded that access to external research funds influences the acceptance and the particular perception of the pay to publish model, highlighting the economic dimension of the problem and warning about issues in the inequality between the centre and the periphery.
You can also read a Q&A about the research with the lead author, Francisco Segado-Boj, at https://www.sspnet.org/community/news/lp-spotlight-attitudes-willingness-and-resources-to-cover-article-publishing-charges/