APC waivers and Ukraine’s publishing output in Gold OA journals: Evidence from five commercial publishers

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of 100 % article processing charge (APC) waivers introduced by the five largest commercial publishers – Elsevier, SAGE, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley – on the participation of Ukrainian researchers in fully Gold Open Access (OA) publishing during 2019–2024. It aims to assess whether the temporary removal of financial barriers during wartime led to measurable changes in Ukraine’s OA publication activity.

Bibliometric data were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection, focusing exclusively on fully Gold OA journals published by the five selected publishers. The analysis covers Ukrainian-affiliated papers published between 2019 and 2024, examining annual publication dynamics, publisher-specific distributions, disciplinary profiles, and cross-country comparisons with Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary.

The number of Ukrainian-authored articles in the selected Gold OA journals increased sharply after 2022, rising by more than 50 % between 2022 and 2023. The strongest growth occurred in journals by Springer Nature and Elsevier and in medical and applied sciences. While the surge correlates with the introduction of full APC waivers, additional factors, such as international collaborations and targeted research funding, also contributed.

The study cannot verify waiver use at the individual article level, as publishers do not disclose this information. It relies on WoS metadata and excludes hybrid, diamond, and non-commercial OA journals. Consequently, results should be interpreted as indicative rather than definitive evidence of causal relationships.

The findings highlight that well-targeted publishing support, such as temporary APC waivers, can sustain scholarly visibility during crises. However, without institutional mediation, awareness campaigns, and broader investment in research capacity, such measures offer only partial solutions to systemic inequities in the APC-based publishing model.

This is the first empirical assessment of the wartime APC-waiver policies for Ukrainian researchers. By isolating a unique natural experiment involving five global publishers, the study contributes new evidence to discussions on equity, resilience, and sustainability in Open Access publishing under crisis conditions.