Read and publish agreements:

A study of the physics field in Brazil and the Springer/Nature Publisher

Abstract

Changes in publishers’ business models challenge both the economics and open access to literature within the scientific communication system. To identify the reading and publishing behaviors of Brazilian researchers in the field of Physics in Springer/Nature journals, the following objectives were established: (a) to categorize the journals in which the authors publish; (b) to record the authors’ institutional affiliations; (c) to identify the research funders; and (d) to indicate the journals most frequently cited in the articles’ reference lists. The research follows an exploratory design with bibliometric techniques, and data were collected from the Web of Science using Physics articles published in 2023 and their references. The results show a high concentration of publications in a few titles: 730 articles (73% of the total) were distributed across 13 Springer/Nature journals with high impact factors, 40% of which were published in two open-access titles with no processing fees. The authors are concentrated in five Brazilian institutions with ten or more records and exhibit strong international collaboration with authors from 64 institutions across 27 countries. The articles identified 226 funding agencies from 27 countries, including nine from Brazil. A total of 22,894 references were analyzed, with the most frequent titles belonging to the American Physical Society. The findings indicate that a potential agreement with Springer/Nature would not include the journals in which Physics authors most frequently publish or cite. Agreements with a single publisher are insufficient to meet the demands of a field that also involves diamond journals, Article Processing Charges, and subscription-based contracts.