Article processing charges in colorectal surgery journals: a cross-sectional bibliometric analysis of cost, citation impact, and geographic disparity

초록

Purpose: Article processing charges (APCs) are central to author-paid open access (OA) publishing. Disparities appear in oncology, pathology, and global surgery, but not colorectal surgery, spanning coloproctology, general surgery, gastroenterology, and oncology journals. We examined APC levels, citation-impact linkage, and authorship geography. Methods: This study was a cross-sectional bibliometric analysis of 32 journals (MEDLINE/PubMed search). APCs (publisher-direct 2026) and 2024 citation metrics (Journal Impact Factor [JIF], SCImago Journal Rank [SJR], SCImago H-index) were extracted. First- and last-author countries for all 2024-2025 articles ( n = 31,164 ) were mapped to World Bank income groups. Multivariable ordinary least squares regression modeled log10(APC) on publisher group, region, OA model, and log10(JIF2024). Results: Median APC was US 3,980 (interquartile range, 3,580–4,390), varying by region:1,467 in Asia, 3,840 in the United Kingdom,4,140 in Western Europe, and 4,175 in the United States. APC correlated with the SCImago H-index (ρ= 0.51,P = 0.003) but not with JIF (P = 0.25) or SJR (P = 0.13). Of 30,320 articles, first authors were from high-income countries in 62.5%, upper-middle-income countries in 34.7%, and lower-middle- or low-income countries in 2.8%; China (30.9%), the United States (23.1%), and Japan (8.0%) were the leading countries. First authors were more often from non-high-income countries than last authors (median difference, +0.68 percentage points;P < 0.001). In multivariable regression (R2 = 0.90), society-direct publishing was associated with lower APCs (β= -0.44,P < 0.001), whereas US-based publishing (β= +0.18,P = 0.019), UK-based publishing (β= +0.16,P = 0.037), and a hybrid OA model (β= +0.15,P = 0.014) were associated with higher APCs. JIF was not independently associated with APC (P = 0.93). Conclusion: Colorectal surgery APCs are high and decoupled from citation impact after adjustment, with underrepresentation of lower-resource-setting authors, especially at senior-author level. Society-owned and Asia-based journals offer lower-cost alternatives but remain a minority. © 2026 Korean Society of Coloproctology This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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