Open Access: Benefits and Pitfalls for Political Scientists

Who benefits from open access (OA) publishing? For whom does it present additional hurdles? We seek to understand the impact of the move to OA publishing models on scholars as producers of articles for academic journals. Specifically, we examine whether research funding, author gender and number, (location of) institutional affiliation, and the European or US origin of the journal affect the likelihood that an article is published OA. Our empirical analysis focuses on twelve well-respected journals. We find that research funding is consistently and positively associated with OA publishing, but also that relatively few articles are published OA. In addition, articles authored by scholars with European institutional affiliations are more likely than those with US institutional affiliations to be published OA. We discuss the implications of our findings and point to avenues for further work to better understand how OA affects scholars’ ability to publish their research in academic journals.