Geographic differences in the uptake of diamond open access and APCs

Geographical and income level analyses have shown that gold OA journals tend to be much more expensive in the Western world and in richer countries compared to other regions where APCs are generally much cheaper and skewed by a minority of expensive journals (Figure 4). Despite that, APCs often dominate the conversation regarding the sustainability and affordability of OA publishing. However, this ignores the funding models that the vast majority of DOAJ listed journals (71%) are using as they do not charge APCs. These diamond journals have also increased at a higher rate than their APC-based counterparts. Differences in the adoption of diamond OA may be observed between regions with Latin America achieving close to 100% diamond OA through regional initiatives such as the SciELO platform. While problems related to the perceived quality of diamond journals persist among researchers, our results shows that the Western APC-based way to do OA does not have to be the only way for researchers.