fairpub: How fair are you when you publish/cite scientific works?

• Overview
• Features
• Limitation
• Installation
• Get started
• Citation
• Contributing
• Acknowledgments
• References

Overview

Scientific journals operate over a broad spectrum of publishing strategies, from strictly for-profit, to non-profit, and in-between business models (e.g. for-profit but academic friendly journals). Scientific publishing is increasingly dominated by for-profit journals, many of which attract prestige and submissions through high impact factors (McGill 2024). In contrast, non-profit journals – those that reinvest revenue into the academic community – struggle to maintain visibility despite offering more equitable publishing models.

The R package fairpub aims to provide a user-friendly toolbox to investigate the fairness of a research (article, bibliographic list, citation list, etc.). The fairness is measured according to two dimensions:

  • the business model of the journal: for-profit vs. non-profit
  • the academic friendly status of the journal: yes or no

A journal with a non-profit business model is fairer than an academic friendly journal with a for-profit business model. But the later is still fairer than a non-academic friendly journal with a for-profit business model.

This information comes from the DAFNEE initiative, a Database of Academia Friendly jourNals in Ecology and Evolution.

The package fairpub also implements the method proposed by Beck et al. (2026): the strategic citation. By deliberately choosing to cite relevant articles from non-profit journals when multiple references would be equally valid, researchers can contribute to increasing their visibility and future impact factor. This method is implemented in the fp_compute_ratio() function and can answer the question How fair am I when I cite previous works? by computing the fairness ratio on the references cited in a manuscript.

The package can also answer the question How fair is my publication list? See the Get started vignette for more information.

Features

The fairpub package can:

  • retrieve the fairness status of a journal with the fp_journal_fairness() function
  • retrieve the fairness status of an article with the fp_article_fairness() function and by querying the OpenAlex bibliographic database
  • compute the fairness ratio of a list references cited in a manuscript with the fp_compute_ratio() function
  • compute the fairness ratio of all publications of an author (or a team) with the fp_compute_ratio() function

In addition, the fp_doi_from_bibtex() function helps user to easily extract DOI from a BibTeX file. The list of DOI can then be pass to the fp_compute_ratio() function.

Limitation

The package fairpub provides a small subset of the journals indexed in the DAFNEE database (fields “Ecology”, “Evolution/Systematics”, “General” and “Organisms”). We are currently working to increase this list of journals.

Installation

You can install the development version from GitHub with:

# Install < remotes > package (if not already installed) ----
if (!requireNamespace("remotes", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("remotes")
}

# Install < fairpub > from GitHub ----
remotes::install_github("frbcesab/fairpub")

Then you can attach the package fairpub:

Get started

The main function of fairpub is fp_compute_ratio(). From a vector of article DOI, this function will report the following metrics:

fp_compute_ratio(doi = list_of_doi)
## $summary
##                                     metric value
##                           Total references    33
##                        References with DOI    33
##                    Deduplicated references    33
##               References found in OpenAlex    30
##                 References found in DAFNEE    10
##     Non-profit & acad. friendly references     9
##     For-profit & acad. friendly references     1
## For-profit & non-acad. friendly references     0
## 
## $ratios
## Non-profit & acad. friendly  For-profit & acad. friendly  For-profit & non-acad. friendly 
##                         0.9                          0.1                              0.0

In this example, this list of references has a fairness ratio (Non-profit and academic friendly) of 90%. But this value must be interpreted with caution. Indeed this ratio has been computed on 26% (10 over 38) of the references, because the journal of 20 articles is not indexed in the DAFNEE database.

Visit the Get started vignette for a complete usage of the fairpub package.

Citation

Please cite fairpub as:

Casajus Nicolas (2026) fairpub: How fair are you when you publish/cite scientific works? R package version 1.0.0. https://github.com/frbcesab/fairpub/

Contributing

All types of contributions are encouraged and valued. For more information, check out our Contributor Guidelines.

Please note that the fairpub project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.

Acknowledgments

This project is a collaborative work among FRB-CESAB scientific team. We want to thank the DAFNEE team for his incredible work in gathering information about scientific journals.

References

Beck M, Annasawmy P, Birre D, Busana M, Casajus N, Coux C, Marino C, Mouquet N, Nicvert L, Oliveira BF, Petit-Cailleux C, Tortosa A, Unkule M, Vagnon C & Veytia D (2026) Citation self-awareness for a fairer academic publishing landscape. BioScience. DOI: 10.1093/biosci/biag028.

McGill B (2024) The state of academic publishing in 3 graphs, 6 trends, and 4 thoughts. URL: https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com.