An article in Nature by Holly Else discusses how researchers in low-income countries may not be benefitting from the growing open-access movement as much as they should. Else summarises the results of a recent study that found that open-access papers generally garnered more citations than non-open-access ones did, therefore demonstrating a wider dissemination of findings. However, the study also found that researchers in low-income countries received “relatively few extra citations from making their papers open access,” identifying an inequitable distribution of benefits. Else argues that without addressing the more entrenched aspects of inequitable research systems on both a local and global scale, researchers in low-income countries may not receive the same intended advantages of open access publications.
