The communication presented here focusses on international disparities in open access publication practices of the Earth Science community. We provide an overview of actual publication practices and comparison between several countries (from Global North and Global South; China, Denmark, France, Indonesia, South Africa, United Kingdom and United States of America) with the intention of stimulating further debate and raising awareness to aid the decision-making processes for the further development of open access practices in the Earth Sciences. This communication represents the authors’ opinions on the reasons for and background of the actively developing practice of scientific publishing via open access, as well as briefly contrasting the current conditions of academic publishing in different countries.