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：开放获取（OA）有助于促进文章的获取。然而，作者或资助者通常需要承担出版成本，这使得未获得经济支持的作者难以参与OA出版，也无法享受OA文章的引文优势。OA可能加剧而非克服出版体系中的现有不平等。为探究这一问题，我们研究了施普林格·自然出版的522,411篇文章。通过相关性和回归分析，我们描述了来自不同收入水平国家的作者、其出版模式选择以及论文引文影响力之间的关系。机器学习分类方法帮助我们探索不同特征在预测出版模式时的重要性。结果表明，符合APC豁免条件的作者在其他作者中更倾向于在金色OA期刊上发表文章。相反，符合APC折扣条件的作者OA出版比例最低，这暗示该折扣不足以激励作者在金色OA期刊上发表文章。我们在金色OA期刊中发现期刊排名与出版模式之间存在强相关性，而在混合期刊中OA选项大多被避免。此外，结果显示，国家的收入水平、资历以及OA出版经验是预测混合期刊中OA出版的最重要因素。