Ngoc-Thi-Bich Tran‡, Trung-Thanh Nguyen§, Dinh-Hai Luong|, Hiep-Hung Pham¶#Corresponding author: Trung-Thanh Nguyen ( thanhnt@huce.edu.vn ) Academic editor: Yasin Hasan Balcıoğlu © Ngoc-Thi-Bich Tran, Trung-Thanh Nguyen, Dinh-Hai Luong, Hiep-Hung Pham. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citation:
Tran N-T-B, Nguyen T-T, Luong D-H, Pham H-H (2026) Open access publishing in Vietnam’s engineering and technology sector: trends and key funding sources. European Science Editing 52: e168651. https://doi.org/10.3897/ese.2026.e168651 |  |
Background: Over the past decade, open access (OA) publishing has gained increasing prominence in higher education systems worldwide. In Vietnam, this shift has been particularly visible within engineering and technology (E&T) universities, in which the requirement that students publish in international journals and the availability of funding have become central to research evaluation. Understanding how OA publishing has evolved and how funding patterns support this development is essential to assessing changes in research dissemination within the academic sector.
Objectives: This study aimed to (1) analyse the growth of OA publications in Vietnamese E&T universities between 2013 and 2024 in relation to national policy reforms on international publication requirements, (2) identify the predominant OA publishing models, and (3) analyse patterns in funding sources that support OA publications and implications of these funding sources for researchers’ choices of outlets for publishing.
Methods: A bibliometric analysis was conducted using publication data retrieved from the Scopus database from 2013 to 2024. The study assessed the distribution of OA publications, the relative prevalence of different models of OA (Gold, Green, etc.) and the extent of funding support for OA articles.
Results: Open access publishing remained modest before 2017 but increased sharply after 2018, coinciding with the introduction of stricter requirements for publishing internationally for doctoral training, eligibility for being a research supervisor, and career advancement. Gold OA emerged as the dominant publishing model in the later years of the study period. Nearly two-thirds (63.3%) of OA publications acknowledged financial support, with domestic public agencies, particularly the National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED) and the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET), forming the primary funding base, complemented by international collaborative sponsors.
Conclusions: Open access publishing is becoming the norm in Vietnam’s E&T universities more because of policies and funding than because of isolated individual initiatives. The growing prominence of Gold OA reflects the interaction between policy-driven incentives, institutional strategies, and the availability of funding. These findings highlight the importance of sustaining and strategically aligning funding mechanisms to support OA publishing in research systems in developing countries.