In this study, we aim to investigate the publishing strategies adopted by the Brazilian scientific community and how they are related to the researchers’ scientific capital. The “research productivity” grant (PQ grant) is taken as an indicator of scientific capital: The greater the PQ grant a researcher receives, the greater is their scientific capital. Personal data from 6,993 researchers linked to at least one Brazilian graduate program in biological sciences were obtained through the Sucupira Platform, data on articles published from 2000 to 2019 were retrieved from the Lattes Platform, and the Directory of Open Access Journals was consulted to classify articles as Open Access (OA). Our main findings indicate that subscription-based journals are the most prevalent publishing strategy, but the proportion of OA publications is increasing over time, mainly with article processing charges (APC). We also observed that the lower the level of PQ grant, the higher the share of articles in OA journals. Finally, we observed a growing trend in the percentage of researchers with high and mid-high adherence to OA from all levels of PQ grant, but mainly with APC. Mapping the dynamics of publishing strategies can play an important step towards driving policies oriented to the promotion of OA.

Brazil plays a key role in the production of scientific knowledge in Latin America (LA), being the most prolific country and a central player for the development of neighboring countries (Belli, 2020; Glänzel, Leta, & Thijs, 2006; Leta, Thijs, & Glänzel, 2013). Among the aspects that may be responsible for placing Brazil in this position, it can be highlighted that Brazil was the country with the most Ph.D.s per million inhabitants in LA until 2012 and the fourth-ranked country in LA and the Caribbean in terms of scientific publications per million inhabitants in 2014. Furthermore, Brazil is the only country in LA with an investment in Research and Development (R&D) similar to that of upper-middle-income economies, with more than 1% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) allocated to R&D from 2007 to 2018 (Schneegans, Lewis, & Straza, 2021; UNESCO, 2015).

In Brazil, as well as in many LA countries, scientific production is mostly focused on life sciences, with an emphasis on biological sciences (UNESCO, 2015). In Brazil, this field is responsible for almost a quarter of the country’s scientific production. Such a remarkable contribution of this field can be explained by several factors, including the country’s biodiversity, which drove the foundation of the country’s research in the imperial period (Schwartzman, 2001), the largest number of researchers in these fields (Leta, 2012), and the pioneering efforts of research institutions such as the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation and the Butantan Institute, founded in 1900 and 1901, respectively, which were the first Brazilian institutions to gain international recognition and visibility in the global scientific community of biological sciences (de Meis, Arruda, & Guimarães, 2007; FIOCRUZ, n.d.; Veiga, 2021).

Another characteristic of Brazilian science is that the majority of public (federal and state) investment in R&D is allocated to higher education institutions. According to UNESCO (2015), these institutions contain more than 67% of Brazilian researchers holding the position of professor in 2011. This is a high proportion when compared with some of the world’s science leaders, as the United States and China (28.6% and 18.9% respectively), or with some LA countries, such as Argentina and Mexico (45% and 50%, respectively) (UNESCO, 2015).

In the context of graduate programs (masters and doctorate), which are mainly supported by the public sector, two main Brazilian agencies must be noted: Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development—CNPq) and Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel—CAPES). CAPES supports Higher Education Institutions and graduate programs, while CNPq funds specific grants and projects to researchers or research teams as well as research scholarships (McManus & Baeta Neves, 2021).

It is worth highlighting an individual CNPq grant named “Research Productivity” (“PQ,” the acronym in Portuguese language), which aims to “value researchers who have outstanding scientific, technological and innovation production in their respective areas of knowledge” (CNPq, 2020). Some authors recognize this grant as a way of rewarding the fame of a specific researcher (Wainer & Vieira, 2013) or a symbol of prestige and distinction in science (Café, Carvalho et al., 2012; Leite & Rocha Neto, 2017).

According to CNPq (2020), the criteria for being awarded a PQ grant include the relevance of the research project, the proponent’s scientific and academic performance (including training qualified personnel), and the researcher’s participation in national or international scientific activities. In addition, there are other criteria specified by CNPq’s Advisory Committees (ACs), which vary across disciplines, but in the natural sciences, they refer mostly to the number and the impact of articles (CNPq, 2020). Therefore, it is clear that researchers awarded a PQ grant guide their efforts towards aspects such as a high level of productivity, including the publishing of articles in the most prestigious scientific journals.

The growing centrality of scientific journals, mainly in scientific evaluation processes, brings publication in this means of communication closer to the discussion conducted by Bourdieu (2004), particularly the concepts of scientific field and habitus. For this author, science should be understood as a field constituted by disputes, in which agents pursue the acquisition and accumulation of scientific capital, a type of capital specific to the scientific environment, which confers prestige and power in the scientific field for those who hold it (Bourdieu, 2004). Publication in scientific journals, which became a norm or an implicit rule, is fully accepted and uncontested in science and illustrates the habitus concept (Bourdieu, 1984). Hence, the choice of journal in which the researcher wants to publish their research findings is a strategic step, as it can have implications for the process of accumulation of capital and, consequently, for how the agents (in this case, the researchers) are perceived in the scientific field.

Thus, the present study aims to investigate the publishing strategies adopted by the Brazilian scientific community and how they are related to different levels of scientific capital. The PQ grant was used as a proxy for scientific capital. In the following section, we present a brief overview of the main models of scientific communication through scientific journals, as well as some questions pertinent to each model.

1.1. Main Models of Scientific Publication in Journals

Scientific journals gained a prominent role in the dissemination of scientific knowledge only in the 20th century, when there was strong growth in scientific production, resulting in the emergence of specialized journals in different areas of knowledge, mainly associated with scientific societies and research institutes (Meadows, 1999). In the second half of the 20th century, with the support of new information technologies, we witnessed an increase not only in the number of journals but also in the participation of commercial publishers (Stumpf, 1996).

In terms of access, printed scientific journals have always had some means of charging authors and/or readers to cover printing and distribution expenses. Initially, authors were charged according to the number of figures and pages upon acceptance for publication; more recently, this type of charge has been named the article processing charge (APC). For readers, the charge was always through subscriptions, usually made by institutions. This is the traditional publishing model, known as the subscription-based model or simply closed model, which encompasses prestigious titles with a high reputation in the scientific community. Such recognition is expressed in high competitiveness to publish in these journals, low acceptance rates, and high levels of citations (Sugimoto, Larivière et al., 2013).

At the beginning of the 1980s, highly prestigious libraries in the United States canceled subscriptions of printed scientific journals, mainly due to difficulties in maintaining payment of high prices. In the following decade, the first electronic journals emerged, following which there was a positive environment for changes in the traditional model of scientific communication, not just concerning support (from print to electronic), but especially in terms of access, that is, from subscriptions to Open Access (OA).

The idea of OA journals became better established with the OA movement, which began to gain strength in the 2000s (Laakso, Welling et al., 2011; Mueller, 2006), with OA being defined only in 2002 in the Budapest Declaration (Chan, Cuplinskas et al., 2002). Its original concept refers to journals with free availability and with full access to their content for readers, who may read, download, copy, and distribute without prioritizing profits but with the ethical commitment to properly cite or acknowledge it.

It is important to emphasize that Brazil has played a prominent role since the beginning of the OA movement with the foundation of the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) in 1997 and also with initiatives developed by the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (IBICT) (Bandeira, 2017). These initiatives and others (not listed here) led Brazil to reach third position in the ranking of countries with journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) in 2021. In that year, the 16,233 journals indexed in the DOAJ were from 125 countries, of which Brazilian journals totaled 1,628 (DOAJ, n.d.).1

Although the OA movement initially supported the idea of not charging for publications, many journals, even those that were founded within the OA concept, such as PLOS ONE, started applying APCs to authors. In parallel, many journals of the subscription-based model, including the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Science, and Nature, started to adopt the hybrid publishing model, in which the articles are published in subscription-based journals, but specific articles are made open for reading in exchange for an APC, which is paid by the authors (Piwowar, Priem et al., 2018). In addition to the hybrid model, some journals have also started charging APCs regardless of the type of access; other journals, whether or not they charge APCs, also apply Submission Fees, that is, a tax charged at the time of article submission. For OA journals, data from the DOAJ indicate that, of the total of 14,439 journals registered in this directory, 10,499 did not charge APCs and only 303 journals charged Submission Fees (DOAJ, n.d.).2

A report by Björk and Solomon (2014) shows differences in the values of APCs according to the type of journal. For OA journals that do not offer the subscription model, the average APC value was $1,418; for OA journals included in the subscription-based model, this average increased to $2,097; and for hybrid journals, the average was even higher, reaching $2,727 (Björk & Solomon, 2014). It is clear that the average APC value increases from the traditional OA journals to the hybrid model. Although the high APC values may be a concern, as they may represent a barrier to publishing, leading authors to select other journals, some recent findings suggest that charging an APC does not seem to be perceived as a negative criterion or a reason that interferes when researchers choose a particular journal (Budzinski, Grebel et al., 2020; Crawford, 2018; Khoo, 2019; Schönfelder, 2020).

Considering the choice of journal as an important step in the scientific publishing process, it is possible to infer that agents adopt different publication strategies in the scientific field to maximize the accumulation of their scientific capital. Based on this premise, we pose the following research questions:

  1. Has the Brazilian scientific community, in one of the most prominent scientific areas of research in the country adopted the strategy of publishing in OA journals?

  2. How far is researchers’ publishing strategy related to their scientific capital, estimated by the PQ grant?

This study, with a quantitative approach, presents a descriptive analysis of Brazilian articles published in scientific journals according to the type of access: OA or subscription-based journals. It considers only articles signed by all researchers (n = 6,993) who are part of the academic staff (permanent, collaborators, or visiting professors) of at least one graduate program in the field of biological sciences in 2017, which encompasses 13 areas of knowledge and 316 graduate programs, according to CAPES (CAPES, 2021). It is important to highlight that 95% of graduate programs in biological sciences are located inside public universities, supported by federal or state governments. Hence, graduate programs are the main engine of Brazilian science (CAPES, 2021).

A list containing the personal and academic information of all researchers was obtained on May 15, 2019, from public data available on the Sucupira Platform (Plataforma Sucupira, 2017). Of these researchers, 34 did not display a CV on the Lattes Platform, a criterion for inclusion in the study.

The full CVs of 6,959 researchers were downloaded on March 8, 2020, using the ScriptLattes software (Mena-Chalco & Junior, 2009). In this step, we obtained a variety of information regarding each researcher, but for the present study we considered only information about articles published in scientific journals in the period from 2000 to 2019. All articles were classified as subscription-based or OA journals, according to the DOAJ list available on April 2, 2020. As our interest lay in articles published in OA journals, this set was classified into four groups: “with APC,” “with APC plus Submission Fee,” “without APC and without Submission Fee,” and “without APC and with Submission Fee.”

For the first classification process (subscription-based or OA journals), LibreOffice was used, allowing us to cross-reference the source title of articles contained in the CV of each Brazilian researcher with data from DOAJ, including not only the source title of journals listed in the directory but also its ISSN, e-ISSN, and alternative source title. For this process to proceed, a prior step was necessary: the standardization of journal information in both data sets (Lattes and DOAJ), where letters were changed to lowercase and items such as blank spaces and hyphens were cleaned. All articles that did not match a corresponding entry in DOAJ were considered subscription-based journals. Once this process of classifying was finished, the data were organized into different files according to the type of access.

2.1. Scientific Publication Strategies

To identify the number of articles without any redundancies and to provide an overview of the overall production, duplicates were removed using the Standard Filter in LibreOffice Calc on the “article title” column. Thus, this command recognized articles with the same title and automatically excluded all the duplicates. We found 202,312 articles published in subscription-based journals and 77,812 in OA journals in the period 2000–2019. Based on these totals, we calculated the total and the share of articles in OA and in subscription-based journals in each 4-year period according to the year of publication (2000–2003, 2004–2007, 2008–2011, 2012–2015 and 2016–2019), as well as the total and share of articles in OA journals according to the type of fee charged. Hence, as the analyses in Figures 1 and 2 focus on the scientific publishing strategies taken by the whole study population and not on individual strategies, redundancies were removed.

2.2. Scientific Publication Strategies Among PQ and Non-PQ Holders

We also analyzed the relationship between the type of journal access in which the articles were published with the category and level of the CNPq PQ grant in 2017. The data about who was awarded this grant were obtained from the Sucupira Platform, an official data source organized by the Ministry of Education and used in the evaluation process of Brazilian graduate programs. The data about scientific production were organized in a pivot table, from which the total number of articles was calculated for each type of access in the respective 4-year period for each researcher. The totals of the pivot table were cross-referenced with the data in the Sucupira Platform, and thus it was possible to obtain the total and the share of articles for each type of journal access and for each category and level of PQ grant. As this analysis considered individual characteristics (Figures 3 and 4), all articles were considered.

2.3. Adherence Ranges Between PQ Grant Holders and Non-PQ

The last step was the classification of each researcher in an adherence range in terms of the share of articles in OA journals. The articles were first organized into 4-year periods, as described in Section 2.1. These five periods allowed us to observe potential changes in the main publishing strategies of Brazilian articles from biological sciences. Then, for each researcher, the share of scientific articles in each type of access was calculated considering the total number of articles of each 4-year period. Once the percentages were calculated, four adherence ranges were established, as follows, for researchers whose articles fell in a certain type of access in the 4-year period:

  • “low adherence”: 0–24.99%

  • “mid-low adhesion”: 25–49.99%

  • “mid-high adherence”: 50%–74.99%

  • “high adherence”: 75%–100%

Finally, to calculate the percentage of researchers in each adherence range in a 4-year period, we excluded researchers who had published no article in a given period, since it introduces a bias in the share of researchers in the adherence range analysis.

It is important to highlight that, different from the analyses of the general scientific production presented in Section 2.1, the analyses to identify the percentage and the total number of articles according to the category of the PQ grant, presented in this section and in the previous one, were carried out without removing duplicates of articles; that is, articles that were signed together with one or more researchers from our study population could be counted more than once in the analyses.

Thus, the analyses that consider scientific capital variables and those that focused on adherence take duplicates into account, and the ranges summed to 281,517 articles published in journals that follow the subscription-based model and 108,458 articles in the OA model. The reason for keeping duplicates in these analyses is to have a better understanding of the relative effort of each researcher in each period in publishing in one or other model. For illustration: An author X has 100 articles in 2000–2003, 10 of which were published in Open Access journals and the rest in subscription-based model journals. Hence this researcher was classified and counted in the set of low adherence researchers. As we have carried out this process with all active Brazilian researchers duplicated, articles that are coauthored with two or more researchers included in this study are indispensable.

For the PQ grant, it is noteworthy to mention that there are three main categories, namely: senior (PQ-SR), category 1 (PQ-1, divided into levels 1A, 1B, 1C and 1D, with 1A being the highest level), and category 2 (PQ-2). In this study, the analyses considered the PQ-1 and PQ-2 categories but not PQ-SR, as most of these researchers are retired and they are not evaluated as researchers awarded the other two types of PQ grant. In our data, we found only 26 researchers awarded a PQ-SR grant and they were excluded.

Inactive researchers, that is, researchers that did not publish at least one publication in a period, were removed from the analysis of that period. The removal of this set of researchers avoids bias in the results, as it may lead to an increase in the fraction of researchers in the low adherence ranges. Finally, among the 6,959 researchers included in our study, many were not awarded a PQ grant (PQ-1 or PQ-2). This set of researchers is named non-PQ.

The number of active researchers, that is, those with at least one article published in each period, whether awarded a PQ grant or not, is presented in Table 1. It can be observed that the number of researchers with PQ-1 grants remains practically constant throughout the five periods. Researchers in categories PQ-2 and non-PQ are the majority of the population and show growth from the first period to the last.

Table 1.

Number of active researchers* in the field of biological sciences according to the period and the level of the CNPq PQ** grant

PeriodPQ grantNon-PQTotal
1A1B1C1D2
2000–2003 242 225 265 369 1,002 2,853 4,956 
2004–2007 241 225 271 382 1,192 3,825 6,136 
2008–2011 242 225 271 383 1,231 4,374 6,726 
2012–2015 242 225 271 383 1,232 4,481 6,834 
2016–2019 242 225 271 383 1,230 4,384 6,735 
PeriodPQ grantNon-PQTotal
1A1B1C1D2
2000–2003 242 225 265 369 1,002 2,853 4,956 
2004–2007 241 225 271 382 1,192 3,825 6,136 
2008–2011 242 225 271 383 1,231 4,374 6,726 
2012–2015 242 225 271 383 1,232 4,481 6,834 
2016–2019 242 225 271 383 1,230 4,384 6,735 
*

Researchers with a professor position in at least one Brazilian graduate program and with at least one article published in the evaluated period.

**

PQ is the acronym in Portuguese for the individual grant “Research productivity.”

In the following sections, we present the results according to the publishing strategies adopted by the total number of researchers, by those awarded different categories of the CNPq PQ grant (PQ), and, finally, the distribution of researchers in the adherence ranges of each type of access and PQ grant category.

3.1. Scientific Publication Strategies

In this section, we analyze the publishing strategies of all researchers that are part of the academic staff of at least one graduate program in the field of biological sciences, providing a retrospective overview. Figure 1 shows the share and the total number of articles in OA and in subscription-based journals of this set of researchers over the five 4-year periods.

Figure 1.

Number and percentage of articles in Open Access and subscription-based journals of the researchers with a professor position in at least one Brazilian graduate program in the field of biological sciences in each period.

Figure 1.

Number and percentage of articles in Open Access and subscription-based journals of the researchers with a professor position in at least one Brazilian graduate program in the field of biological sciences in each period.

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Although it is the focus of this study, it is important to highlight that Figure 1 reveals that the total number of articles (lines) increased over time as a result of the increase in the number of researchers included in our analysis.

As for the proportion of OA and subscription-based journals, which is the focus here, it can be seen that articles in subscription-based journals represent the largest fraction throughout the whole of the period studied; that is, it has been the main strategy for disseminating new knowledge. However, there is a clear increase in the share of articles published in OA over time, going from 20.6% of the total number of articles in the first period to 31.0% in the last period. We also observed strong growth in OA articles, from 6,351 in the first period to 22,455 articles in the last period (253.6% growth). The number of articles in subscription-based journals has also grown, but at a lower rate: from 24,528 articles in the first period to 49,912 articles in the last period, that is, 103.5% growth.

It is worth remembering that the concept of an OA journal is relatively recent compared with subscription-based journals, which include prestigious journals that are organized in an increasingly oligopolistic market structure (Larivière, Haustein, & Mongeon, 2015; Sunye, Shima, & Setenareski, 2019). Therefore, the relative growth of articles in OA journals in the later periods apparently has to do with the characteristics of the studied population and field as well as the availability of more OA journals. In any case, it indicates that this publication model is gaining more space in the studied population, which, in the long term, can impact the oligopolistic market structure.

As OA journals can have different fee structures or may not charge fees at all, we present a more detailed analysis of the articles in OA journals published by researchers in biological sciences according to the fees applied by these journals. In Figure 2, it is possible to observe that OA articles are mainly published in journals that charge APCs, with a significant increase in the adoption of this model in the last two periods. These articles represented 39.8% in the first period and reached 65.1% of the total OA articles in the last period (blue and dark blue in the columns). In parallel, we note that the fraction of articles in OA journals that do not charge APC decreases dramatically in the last two periods. Finally, articles published in journals that apply a submission fee represent the smallest fraction, with the largest share of 13.84% in the first period.

Figure 2.

Number and percentage of articles in Open Access journals with and without APCs of researchers with a professor position in at least one Brazilian graduate program in the field of biological sciences in each period.

Figure 2.

Number and percentage of articles in Open Access journals with and without APCs of researchers with a professor position in at least one Brazilian graduate program in the field of biological sciences in each period.

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Figure 2 also presents the quantitative analysis of articles in the four types of OA journals (see the lines). It can be observed that the number of articles published in journals that do not charge APCs was higher than those that charge APCs in the first two periods. Since then, it has remained stable, while the number of articles in journals with APCs has grown considerably.

It is interesting to note that the model of OA in which APCs are not applied represented the largest share and number of articles until the second period, which according to Laakso et al. (2011) comprises the “years of innovation” (from 2000 to 2004) and part of the “years of consolidation” of open access (2005 to 2009). In the first period, we observed the emergence of new business models to implement OA on a large scale, such as BioMed Central, which applied fees to the authors. In the second period, several new commercial publishers have appeared, and others that were already established have started entering the Open Access publishing market. It was also at this moment that megajournals emerged, that is, journals that follow the OA with APCs model and have a large volume of publications with a broad scope (Spezi, Wakeling et al., 2017).

The number of publications in megajournals has been increasing exponentially (Ellers, Crowther, & Harvey, 2017), which may explain, at least partially, the increase in OA articles shown in Figure 2. An example of a megajournal is PLOS ONE (Björk, 2015; Spezi et al., 2017), and in our study, we found that the number of articles published in it by the studied population was 18 in the second period (the period in which PLOS ONE was launched), increasing to 1,467 articles in the last period.

3.2. Scientific Publication Strategies Among PQ and Non-PQ Holders

In this section and the following ones, we focus on the adoption of different scientific publishing strategies and their relation to different categories of PQ grant, which, based on the theories proposed by Bourdieu (2017), we classify in our study as an indicator of the position of researchers in the structure of the scientific field. We start by showing the share and the total number of articles published in OA and subscription-based journals according to the category of the PQ grant (Figure 3A) and over the periods (Figure 3B).

Figure 3.

Percentage of articles in Open Access (OA) and subscription-based journals according to the level of the PQ* grant (A) and over the periods for PQ-1A+1B holders and non-PQ holders (B) with a professor position in at least one Brazilian graduate program in the field of biological sciences in each period. * PQ is the acronym in Portuguese for the individual grant “Research productivity.”

Figure 3.

Percentage of articles in Open Access (OA) and subscription-based journals according to the level of the PQ* grant (A) and over the periods for PQ-1A+1B holders and non-PQ holders (B) with a professor position in at least one Brazilian graduate program in the field of biological sciences in each period. * PQ is the acronym in Portuguese for the individual grant “Research productivity.”

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Figure 3A shows that, regardless of whether they are PQ holders or not, both groups present the largest fraction of articles in subscription-based journals. However, the share of these articles is higher among PQ holders. In fact, the higher the PQ level, the higher the fraction of articles in subscription-based journals: Within PQ-2 holders, we found that 71.19% of the articles were published in subscription-based journals, while this share is 76.37% among PQ-1A. This fraction is lowest for non-PQ holders (70.39%). The opposite trend is observed when we consider the articles published in OA journals: The higher the PQ level, the lower the share of articles in these journals. Non-PQ holders display the highest share (29.61%) of articles in OA.

In Figure 3B, percentages were calculated based on the total number of articles in OA and in subscription-based journals for two groups: PQ-1A+1B (the most prestigious researchers) and non-PQ holders. It can be noted that the numbers of articles (dotted lines) published both in OA (gray) and in subscription-based (blue) journals by non-PQ holders increase over the periods, but this is less accentuated in the last two periods. However, for the group of PQ-1A+1B holders, we observe an increase in the number of articles up to the third period, after which there is a decrease in the number of articles published in subscription-based journals.

Looking at articles in OA journals and the types of fees applied (with or without APC and with or without Submission Fees), Figure 4A shows that regardless of being a PQ holder or not, the largest fraction of articles is published in OA journals with APCs (dark blue column/line). However, there is a clear difference between PQ and non-PQ holders concerning articles published in OA journals without APCs: PQ-1A holders publish only 26.8% of their articles in OA without APCs, while non-PQ holders publish 37.4%. The smallest fractions of articles are published in OA journals that charge submission fees (dotted column/line). The number and the share of articles in journals that charge submission fees but without APCs (dotted dark gray column/line) are even less adopted by the researchers.

Figure 4.

Percentage of articles in Open Access journals with or without APCs according to the level of the PQ* grant (A) and over the periods for the groups of PQ-1A+1B holders and non-PQ holders (B) with a professor position in at least one Brazilian graduate program in the field of biological sciences in each period. * PQ is the acronym in Portuguese for the individual grant “Research productivity.”

Figure 4.

Percentage of articles in Open Access journals with or without APCs according to the level of the PQ* grant (A) and over the periods for the groups of PQ-1A+1B holders and non-PQ holders (B) with a professor position in at least one Brazilian graduate program in the field of biological sciences in each period. * PQ is the acronym in Portuguese for the individual grant “Research productivity.”

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Figure 4B shows that the share of articles in OA journals with APCs is higher for the group of PQ-1A+1B holders than for non-PQ holders in all periods. However, both the PQ-1A+1B and the non-PQ holders almost doubled the number of articles in OA journals with APCs after the second period.

The data presented in Figures 3 and 4 are the first indication that different scientific publishing strategies are related to the position that researchers occupy in the scientific field. These findings corroborate a previous study conducted by our team (Leta, dos Santos Costa, & Mena-Chalco, 2017), which shows the preference for publishing in subscription-access journals by PQ-1A holders.

3.3. Adherence Ranges Between PQ Grant Holders and Non-PQ

In this section, we focus on the distribution of researchers (not of articles, as seen in the previous sections) according to PQ grant categories and the adherence ranges to OA journals, as follows: low (0–24.99%), mid-low (25–49.99%), mid-high (50%–74.99%), and high adherence (75%–100%).

In Figure 5, we see that most researchers, regardless of whether they are PQ holders or not, are classified in the low and mid-low OA adherence ranges; the sum of these two ranges exceeds 70% of the researchers, considering all the PQ grant categories and periods. On the other hand, among high and mid-high adherence ranges, over all periods non-PQ holders are the largest fraction, that is, among those with less scientific capital, more than 25% have published preferably in OA journals.

Figure 5.

Number and percentage of active researchers* in the field of biological sciences by adherence range to Open Access journals, according to the level of PQ** grant and period. * Researchers with a professor position in at least one Brazilian graduate program and with at least one article published in the evaluated period. ** PQ is the acronym in Portuguese for the individual grant “Research productivity.”

Figure 5.

Number and percentage of active researchers* in the field of biological sciences by adherence range to Open Access journals, according to the level of PQ** grant and period. * Researchers with a professor position in at least one Brazilian graduate program and with at least one article published in the evaluated period. ** PQ is the acronym in Portuguese for the individual grant “Research productivity.”

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Figure 6 focuses on the share and the number of PQ holders or non-PQ holders classified as high adherence (dark blue in Figure 5) to OA with or without APC. The number of active researchers in the high adherence ranges for PQ-1A+1B and non-PQ holders in each period was considered 100% for each data set. The numbers and percentages are shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6.

Number and percentage of active researchers* in the field of biological sciences in the range of high adherence to Open Access journals with or without APC among PQ-1A+1B holders and non-PQ holders. * Researchers with a professor position in at least one Brazilian graduate program and with at least one article published in the evaluated period.

Figure 6.

Number and percentage of active researchers* in the field of biological sciences in the range of high adherence to Open Access journals with or without APC among PQ-1A+1B holders and non-PQ holders. * Researchers with a professor position in at least one Brazilian graduate program and with at least one article published in the evaluated period.

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We observed that until the third period, the highest number and percentage of non-PQ holders showed high adherence to OA without APC. However, this percentage and number dropped in the last two periods. We also observed that for both PQ-1A+1B and non-PQ holders, there is an increase in the number and percentage of researchers with high adherence to OA with APC. It is noteworthy that no PQ-1A+1B holders with high adherence to OA without APC were observed in the last two periods.

The present study aims to investigate the publishing strategies adopted by the Brazilian scientific community, and how it is related to the researchers’ scientific capital, estimated by whether they are awarded a PQ grant, a symbol of distinction among Brazilian researchers.

Based on data from scientific publications available on the Lattes Platform and the DOAJ, our findings reveal that the subscription-based model prevails among the Brazilian researchers included in our study, regardless of whether or not they are PQ holders. If, on the one hand, a publication in such a type of journal implies high costs and restricted access, it also implies more prestige for researchers, as subscription-based model journals tend to be considered the most prestigious. It is important to highlight that this finding was expected for PQ holders but not for non-PQ holders. A possible explanation for this unexpected finding is that non-PQ holders may be collaborating with national or international groups, which may have grants to cover all expenses with subscription-based journals. Nevertheless, it is just an assumption, as this is not the focus of our study.

Considering the trends over time, we found that the fraction of articles published in OA, mainly with APCs, has increased. This finding was also observed by dos Santos Costa (2019) when studying all PQ-1A holders in 2016 and their scientific publications between 2000 and 2015. Hence, the increasing preference of Brazilian researchers for OA journals with APCs is notable, mainly after the second period, in which both PQ and non-PQ holders almost doubled the number of articles. This finding must be highlighted, given that the publishing costs are usually charged from individual research grants, in other words, from authors. In the case of Brazilian science, as science and technology (S&T) policies oriented to APC payment are scarce (Pavan & Barbosa, 2017), these fees are often paid by allocating part of the already scarce individual research grants, graduation program budgets or even the authors’ own salaries. This context highlights the main point of concern regarding the growing adoption of OA journals with the APC model: Because the most prestigious journal titles are associated with higher APC rates, this can create more inequality in a system where S&T policies towards the payment of these fees are still being established, as is the case in Brazil (Pavan & Barbosa, 2018), as it imposes a real barrier to researchers with fewer financial resources.

It is also interesting to note that the study of Crawford (2017) demonstrates that 55% of OA journals in the biomedical field applied APCs and the study of Pavan and Barbosa (2018) reinforces this finding by demonstrating that the biological sciences have the highest number of OA journals and one of the highest APC rates. These findings reinforce the results found in our study and suggest that publishing in OA journals with APCs is being stimulated within the field of biological sciences through formal editorial means.

Although we have found a prevalence of articles published in subscription-based journals, our findings clearly show that the share of articles in OA journals differs notably when we consider whether researchers are PQ holders or non-PQ holders. The latter published the highest fraction of articles in OA journals, while we have shown that the higher the PQ category, the smaller the fraction of articles in OA journals. The opposite is true for OA without APCs: Researchers publish proportionately more in OA with APCs the higher the PQ grant level. Non-PQ researchers are those who publish less in this OA model. This finding is in line with the result found by Olejniczak and Wilson (2020), which indicates that participation in publications in OA with APCs is easier for those who have more resources and career stability.

The evidence that researchers with different levels of scientific capital display different scientific publishing strategies was also corroborated in the analysis of the adherence ranges. Our findings reinforce that OA is the less adopted model among PQ-1A and 1B holders, who are the majority of researchers classified in the low and mid-low adherence ranges to OA. Although we observed a migration of researchers from the low adherence range to the high and mid-high ranges in the last two periods, PQ-1A and 1B holders appeared to be the group with the lowest share of researchers classified with high and mid-high levels of adherence to OA.

Hence, the findings in our study illustrate Bourdieu’s view (Bourdieu, 2004) of the scientific environment, scientific capital, and their relationship with the two main publishing strategies. The preference of researchers for subscription-based journals and the growing preference for OA with APCs suggest that a notable proportion of agents are using these publishing strategies to accumulate capital and thus maintain or compete for the monopoly of authority in the field. This scenario is in line with a widespread perception that the subscription-based model includes well-established journals and titles of great prestige, which are often under the control of the major publishers. Publishing in these well-established journals is seen as positive (Smith & Dickson, 2016), and journals that are often perceived as more prestigious, with greater market power and that generally adopt the hybrid model, are those that charge higher APCs (Budzinski et al., 2020; Schönfelder, 2020; Solomon & Björk, 2012).

It is noteworthy that the growing adherence of Brazilian researchers to OA journals with APCs is not in line with the ideals of the OA movement but with recent international initiatives that try to establish the payment of APCs and/or the consolidation of the hybrid model as a solution for the transition for OA (Debat & Babini, 2020; Finch, 2013; Marques, 2021; McNutt, 2019; Weitzel, 2014).

In Brazil, policies oriented to OA are scarce, but FAPESP, the funding agency for S&T activities in the state of São Paulo, became the first governmental funding agency in the country to launch an OA decree (FAPESP, 2019) to establish that articles resulting from its funding must be published in OA and deposited in online repositories within 12 months after publication. However, this policy does not address issues about funding publication fees, and Pavan and Barbosa (2018) warn that the lack of a general S&T policy toward a publishing model established by Brazilian funding agencies can lead to a decrease in publications with higher impact due to the difficulty of paying the APCs. This internal situation may enlarge inequalities in Brazilian science; that is, it may enlarge the performance gap among Brazilian researchers in terms of scientific publication, leading to an even more critical division regarding the level of scientific capital, measured here by the level of PQ grant.

It is important to point out that although our findings demonstrate the preference of researchers in the field of biological sciences for subscription-based journals, a previous report conducted by Science-Metrix (2018) showed a different scenario for Brazilian publishing strategies. The report showed that OA articles accounted for 74% of Brazilian publications in 2014, a share well above the world average of 55%. However, it has used the concept gratis OA, that is, articles available on the Internet with full content and with no charges for reading or downloading were classified as OA articles. This is a more comprehensive definition of OA (it includes, for instance, the hybrid model) than the one we have used in our study. We realize that the use of the DOAJ as our single source for defining OA offers a limited view of OA, but on the other hand it offers a view closer to the OA original concept, which refers to journals and not to articles. Thus, other types of OA were not evaluated, such as Green, Bronze, and Hybrid OA. In addition, some journals may have modified their publication model over time, which was not evaluated in our analyses.

Therefore, the attribution of publication type was made based on the most recent DOAJ list available at the time of analysis (2020), as .csv files from previous years were not available, and because this file is updated every hour and is then available for download. Furthermore, we emphasize that this analysis may bring a positive bias to the results observed in OA, since these journals may have recently migrated to this model. The option of the authors for restricted access may, in reality, be even greater than was observed in our analyses, especially in the initial 4-year period.

Another aspect to be considered is that our study focuses on Brazilian scientists, so it illustrates the situation of a country and a distinct field in LA, which differs from the reality of countries from the Global North, for example. Additionally, it is important to highlight that the analysis of the entire active community of Brazilian researchers was possible due to the Lattes Platform, a public and open system maintained by CNPq that provides academic and scientific data about Brazilian researchers from all areas of knowledge.

Finally, we emphasize that understanding the dynamics of publishing strategies adopted by researchers in the field of biological sciences, based on the macro classification presented in our study, can play an important step toward understanding how researchers obtain scientific capital and drive policies in the advancement and promotion of OA.

We thank Dr. Jesus P. Mena-Chalco for helping with the use of scriptLattes and for providing the DOAJ data.

Deise Sarzi: Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Visualization, Writing—original draft, Writing—review & editing. Jacqueline Leta: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Resources, Supervision, Writing—review & editing.

The authors have no competing interests.

This work received financial support from CNPq through both the doctoral scholarship granted to Deise Sarzi (141533/2017-0) and the funding awarded to the Research Project n. 434.146/2018-8.

Data were collected from a Brazilian open source, the Lattes Platform, and are available at the Harvard Dataverse, with the following DOI: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/W27RU4.

1

Data referring to April 24, 2021.

2

Data referring to April 2, 2020.

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Author notes

Handling Editor: Vincent Larivière

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