Open access and international co-authorship: a longitudinal study of the United Arab Emirates research output

This study investigates the interplay between open access (OA), co-authorship, and international research collaboration. While previous research has dealt with these factors separately, there is a knowledge gap in how these interact within a single dataset. The data includes all Scopus-indexed journal articles published over 11 years (2009–2019) where at least one of the authors has an affiliation to a United Arab Emirates (UAE) institution (30 400 articles in total). For assessment of OA status of articles, the study utilized Unpaywall data for articles with a digital object identifier, and manual web searches for articles without. There was consistently strong growth in publication volume counts as well as shares of OA articles across the years. The analysis provides statistically significant results supporting a positive relationship between a higher number of co-authors, in particular international, and OA status of articles. Further research is needed to investigate potentially explaining factors for the relationship between co-authorship and increased OA rate such as e.g., implementation of national science policy initiatives, varying availability of funding for OA publishing in different countries, patterns in adoption of various OA types in different co-authorship constellations, and potentially unique discipline-specific patterns as they relate to co-authorship and OA rate.