International Collaboration in Open Access Publications: How Income Shapes International Collaboration

Michael Cary and Taylor Rockwell
Additional contact information
Taylor Rockwell: Department of English, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA

Publications, 2020, vol. 8, issue 1, 1-24

Abstract: Does the rise of open access journals change the way researchers collaborate? Specifically, since publishing in open access journals requires a publication fee, does income affect how researchers form international collaborations? To answer this question, we create a new data set by scraping bibliographic data from Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI) journals. Using the four income group classifications from the World Bank Analytical Classifications, we find that researchers from low-income nations are more likely to form international collaborations than researchers from wealthier nations. This result is verified to be significant using a series of pairwise Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests. We then study which nations most frequently form international collaborations with other nations and find that the USA, China, Germany, and France are the most preferred nations for forming international collaborations. While most nations prefer to form international collaborations with high-income nations, some exceptions exist, where a nation most often forms international collaborations with a nearby nation that is either an upper-middle-income or lower-middle-income nation. We further this analysis by showing that these results are apparent across the six different research categories established in the Frascati Manual. Finally, trends in publications in MDPI journals mirror trends seen in all journals, such as the continued increase in the percentage of published papers involving international collaboration.

Keywords: international collaboration; collaboration; open access; open science; publication; data set (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A2 D83 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/8/1/13/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/8/1/13/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jpubli:v:8:y:2020:i:1:p:13-:d:326339

Access Statistics for this article

Publications is currently edited by Ms. Jennifer Zhang

More articles in Publications from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().