Do submissions entitled to an auto-waiver take more time to be accepted by open access journals?

BACKGROUND: Open access initiative is a “talk of the town” in scientific community in recent years. Many open access publishers have an auto-waiver policy for resource limited countries. It is still not documented that whether submissions from auto- and non-waiver countries take the same time to be accepted by the editorial office or a sense of priority works for non-waiver groups. FINDINGS: Analyzing 248 articles published in BMC Research Notes in 2013 we have found that average 143.8 ± 5.134 and 138.4 ± 12.01 days respectively for non-waiver and auto-waiver countries were required by the editorial office to accept a submission (p = 0.6983). CONCLUSION: From this current investigation it is quite evident that both categories of submissions, coming from auto- and non-waiver countries, are equally treated by the for-profit open access journals and thus it can be concluded that no sense of priority works in case of submissions those come from non-waiver countries.