World Bank income classification
The World Bank classifies economies as low-income, lower-middle-income, upper-middle-income or high-income using gross national income per capita. Publishers that do not follow Research4Life generally build their waiver tiers on these bands, often adding a further condition on total GDP.
Checked 1 August 2026
How it works
How publishers add thresholds
Taylor & Francis requires low-income status together with GDP below USD 100 billion for a full waiver, and lower-middle-income status with GDP below USD 200 billion for a 50% discount. Springer Nature uses low-income economies as of July 2023 for full waivers and lower-middle-income economies with 2022 GDP below USD 200 billion for 50%.
Why a GDP ceiling is added
Income per head does not describe the size of an economy or its research capacity. A populous lower-middle-income country can have a large total output and a funded research system, which the per-capita figure alone does not capture.
The annual revision problem
Bands are revised each year. A country can move up and lose eligibility with no announcement from any publisher. One publisher list examined here carried a revision date more than a year before it was read, which is why the date a policy was last updated matters as much as its content.
Graduated rather than flat
IEEE does not apply a single rate to lower-middle-income countries. Its discount ranges from 25% to 50% depending on the country's GNI per capita in the World Bank lending groups.