Open Access, Global Inequalities and Scholarly Journals | Open Research Community

"As Márton Demeter and Ronina Istratii (2020, p. 519) suggest in their article, even though scholars in Humanities and Social Sciences, such as in Area Studies, can be expected to have less financial resources at their disposal than their colleagues in natural sciences or technology fields, e.g., in Computer Sciences, this has not been found to be borne out by the levels of article processing fees that Open Access journals in these fields levy.

On the one hand, article processing charges levels have been found to be positively intercorrelated with journal-level impact factor metrics. On the other hand, Demeter and Istratii (2020, p. 519) indicate that, rather than responding to higher purchasing power levels in technology-related research sector, Open Access journals set their article processing charges' levels based on the financial ability of global scholarly associations, such as  the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), to charge lower than market-average author-facing fees, despite the high impact factor rankings of their journals...."