Introduction
The benefits of publishing research open access (OA) so that it is immediately available online and can be shared, cited, and built upon, have been demonstrated through many studies. For example, it has been shown that globally, gold open access articles attract 1.64 times more citations, 6.02 times more downloads, and have 4.91 times higher Altmetric Scores compared to non-open access articles.2,3
Gold OA is an increasingly important part of scientific publishing, which can be seen through the rapid rise in the number of gold OA articles published in China in recent years. These articles are having a global impact and making an important contribution to China’s scientific, technical and medical (STM) ambitions.
This white paper, after first considering the wider context of OA growth in China, drills down into the growth and impact of China’s gold OA articles in the Global South using both industry-wide and Springer Nature data.
Scope, methodology, and definitions
This study explores China gold OA impact in the Global South using publication and citation data from Dimensions, Altmetric data from Dimensions, and COUNTER 5.1 download data. Where possible, this data has been made available on Figshare.4
China’s gold OA articles include primary research and review articles in hybrid and full OA journals and published with a corresponding author in China. Citations may come from all types of publications, and the region of the citing article is based on any author listed, not just the corresponding author.
Where comparisons are made between the citation performance in different years, citations received within the two years following the publication of the cited article are used. For instance, if an article was published in 2020, citations from publications in 2020, 2021, and 2022 are counted. Where comparisons are not being made between individual years, the number of citations is based on those accumulated by July 2025. The number of downloads is calculated from the point the article published online to July 2025.
The term ‘Global South’ refers to countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia (excluding Israel, Japan, South Korea, and China), and Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand). In the analysis, China is excluded from the Global South to show China’s OA impact in the Global South beyond its own borders.
2 Springer Nature; Emery, C.; Lucraft, M.; Monaghan, J.; Stuart, D.; Winter, S. (2021). Going for gold: exploring the reach and impact of Gold open access articles in hybrid journals [White paper]. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.16860229
3 Altmetric. (n.d.). The donut and Altmetric Attention Score. https://www.altmetric.com/about-us/our-data/donut-and-altmetric-attention-score/
4 Springer Nature, (2026). Data set for white paper - Open for impact: China’s gold open access boosting global innovation and supporting the Global South. figshare. [Dataset].
https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/_Data_set_for_white_paper_Open_for_impact_China_s_gold_open_access_boosting_global_innovation_and_supporting_the_Global_South/32658399
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