Cui Bono? Cumulative Advantage in Open Access Publishing

Abstract

This study examines the differences in production and consumption of Open Access (OA) literature across institutional prestige variables and examines who is gaining the most benefit from the adoption of current OA publishing practices. In this approach we define production as the publication of OA literature (as a proportion of all research literature produced) by an entity (author, institution, country, continent). We define consumption as evidence of using OA literature as measured by citations to OA literature. Using data points for over 24,000 institutions we examine the role of institutional prestige in the Open Access landscape. Overall, we find medium to strong correlations between OA production and OA consumption. We find that higher ranked institutes are both greater producers and consumers of Open Access literature. Importantly, we find a stronger correlation for higher ranked institutions compared to lower ranked ones when using ranking data from the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings. This indicates that it is the higher ranked and more prosperous institutes that are best placed to benefit from current Open Science and Open Access publishing structures.