APCs and citation impact of Gold OA articles authored by Ukrainian scholars before and during Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine (2020-2023)

TL;DR

This study analyzes how Ukrainian scholars' APC expenditures, authorship patterns, and citation impacts of Gold OA articles changed from 2020 to 2023, revealing minimal effects of APC levels on citation impact amid wartime disruptions.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of APC trends, authorship, and citation impact of Ukrainian scholars' Gold OA articles before and during the Ukraine war, highlighting minimal correlation between APCs and citations.

Findings

APC expenditures declined by 24.6% from 2020 to 2023.

Small but significant correlation between APCs and citation impact.

Major publishers' APC waivers had limited effect on Ukrainian authorship.

Abstract

This study first examines how APC expenditures, authorship patterns, and publishing venues of Ukrainian scholars changed between the pre-war (2020-2021) and wartime (2022-2023) periods. Second, it explores the extent to which APC levels are associated with the field-normalized citation impact (FNCI) of Gold Open Access articles authored by Ukrainian scholars. Statistical analysis revealed a small but significant correlation between APC amounts and citation impact, though the effect size was minimal, suggesting higher APCs did not substantially boost citations. APC waivers offered by major publishers such as Springer and Elsevier since 2022 resulted in only a slight increase in the number of articles authored solely by Ukrainian scholars. Despite these waivers, MDPI and Aluna maintained the largest shares. Between 2020 and 2023, the number of articles authored solely by Ukrainian scholars in foreign journals fell by 25.7 percent, and total APC spending declined by 24.6 percent, from 1.24 million EUR to 0.93 million EUR. Medicine accounted for the largest share of both articles and APC expenditure, with the majority published in Aluna journals.