Waiving Article Processing Charges for Least Developed Countries: A Keystone of a Large-Scale Open Access Transformation | Niels Taubert , Andre Bruns, Christopher Lenke and Graham Stone | Insights, 34(1), 1-13
Based on information drawn from a sample of 520 Springer Nature publications, this article investigates whether it is economically feasible for a large publishing house to waive article processing charges for the group of 47 least developed countries.
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This article makes a strong case for waiving article processing charges for scholars hailing from least developed countries that seek to publish in Open Access journals, since for publishers the impact of doing that can be expected to be financially negligible, as these scholars account for a small fraction only of the worldwide article output, while making a significant contribution toward the inclusion of under-represented researchers into the formal circuits of scientific communication.