The scientific publishing market suffers from injustice in several regards. Interestingly, traces of injustice can be found in both open-access (OA) and closed-access (CA) publishing-models. The OA-model makes scientific literature freely accessible for all scholars - but, the costs of publishing have to be assumed by somebody (e.g. the authors via APCs). This, however, may not be possible for authors who do not benefit from financial support for OA-publishing. In succession, such authors cannot publish in the OA-model (instead they must turn to the CA-model) and cannot profit from the citation advantage that was shown for many OA-articles [1]. Researchers (at institutions) who are not able to maintain subscriptions to CA-publications suffer from the CA-model as it builds a barrier to access the required resources. This may result in falling behind the state of the art in the field which along with it may negatively affect future publication success in outlets of high reputation. This study (conducted with data from Scopus and Unpaywall) will research the effect on researchers’ scientific success grounded in the unfairness of both publishing models. We aim to answer three questions. First, is there any limitation for a group of researchers (e.g. from different countries, career stages, career positions) to cite the CA-papers? Second, is there any limitation for researchers to publish in the OA-model and receiving citations? To answer these questions, we try to find the relationship between the groups that researchers belong to and the tendency to cite/publish in the OA- or CA-model. Third, to what extent do these limitations affect the scientific success of scholars? We assess scientific success by comparing the receiving citations for each group. We expect that the tendency to cite OA- and publish CA-articles affects the scientific success of scholars negatively.