Open Access (OA) facilitates access to articles. But, authors or funders often must pay the publishing costs preventing authors who do not receive financial support from participating in OA publishing and citation advantage for OA articles. OA may exacerbate existing inequalities in the publication system rather than overcome them. To investigate this, we studied 522,411 articles published by Springer Nature. Employing correlation and regression analyses, we describe the relationship between authors affiliated with countries from different income levels, their choice of publishing model, and the citation impact of their papers. A machine learning classification method helped us to explore the importance of different features in predicting the publishing model. The results show that authors eligible for APC waivers publish more in gold-OA journals than others. In contrast, authors eligible for an APC discount have the lowest ratio of OA publications, leading to the assumption that this discount insufficiently motivates authors to publish in gold-OA journals. We found a strong correlation between the journal rank and the publishing model in gold-OA journals, whereas the OA option is mostly avoided in hybrid journals. Also, results show that the countries' income level, seniority, and experience with OA publications are the most predictive factors for OA publishing in hybrid journals.

翻译：摘要：开放获取（OA）促进了论文的获取。但是，作者或资助者通常必须支付出版费用，这可能阻止那些没有财务支持的作者参与到OA出版中，而OA文章的引用优势也会进一步加剧现有出版体系的不平等。为了探究这一点，我们研究了Springer Nature出版的522,411篇文章。运用相关和回归分析，我们描述了不同收入水平国家的作者选择不同出版模式以及他们论文被引用的情况之间的关系。一种机器学习分类方法帮助我们探究了不同特征在预测出版模式中的重要性。结果显示，有资格获得文章处理费（APC）豁免的作者比其他人更多地发表金色OA期刊上的文章。相反，有资格获得APC折扣的作者的开放获取出版比例最低，这表明该折扣不足以激励作者为金色OA期刊出版。在金色OA期刊中，期刊排名与出版模式之间存在强烈的相关性，而在混合期刊中，开放获取选项大多被避免。此外，结果表明，国家收入水平、高级和有经验的开放获取出版对混合期刊中的开放获取出版具有最大的预测因子。