Qui Bono?: Cumulative advantage in Open Access publishing

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 Open Access publishing practices.

Our work is motivated by trying to identify whether barriers related to accessing research literature, such as being located at an institution with limited access to non-OA literature, affects the citation behaviour of scholars.

Overall, we find medium to strong correlations between OA production and OA consumption. Importantly, we find a stronger correlation for higher ranked institutions, when using ranking data from the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings. This may indicate that it is the higher ranked and more prosperous institutes that are best placed to benefit from current Open Science structures. Further, the levying of ‘Article Processing Charges’ (APCs) for the publication of Open Access literature may well serve to further embed the inequalities in the current academic publishing regime.