Managing the transition to open access publishing: a psychological perspective

Abstract

To manage the transition to the open access (OA) model of scholarly publishing, we need to understand better what enables, encourages and inhibits the adoption of OA publishing among scientists, and to appreciate individual differences within disciplines. The study adopts a psychological perspective to elucidate motivations, capabilities and opportunities for OA publishing among bioscientists in the UK. To identify differences within the discipline, bioscientists with starkly different past practices for disclosing research data and technologies were interviewed. The sampled bioscientists face similar obstacles and enablers in their physical environment, but that their motivations and experience of their social environments differ. One group is strongly motivated by their moral convictions and beliefs in benefits of OA and feels peer pressure related to OA. The other group expresses fewer pro-OA beliefs, holds beliefs demotivating OA publishing, but feels pressure from research funders to adopt it. The former group makes more frequent use of OA publishing, which suggests that only those with strong motivations will work to overcome the social and physical obstacles. The individual differences within the discipline suggest that bioscientists are unlikely to respond to OA policies in the same way and, thus, the appropriateness of one-size-fits-all OA policies is questioned.

Altruism or Self-Interest? Exploring the Motivations of Open Access Authors

“…10 A third study also explored biomedical publishing and found that, instead of discipline, a major source of differences in OA uptake was the authors' "past knowledge-disclosure practices," such as in commercial patents versus open-source software. 11 Our study hoped to clarify both the prevalence of the various motives for OA authors and the extent of disciplinary differences.…”

Factors affecting authors' manuscript submission behaviour: A systematic review

“…The cost of publication also triggered authors' concerns about how to pay, which impacted their submission decision (Schroter & Tite, 2006). Weckowska et al (2017) also found that authors considered whether the publishing cost was proportional to the publication gain.…”

“…Timeliness was measured by the overall time from submission to publication or specific sub‐processes. Several surveys found that shorter turnaround time was a motivating factor to select OA journals (Jamali et al, 2020; Weckowska et al, 2017). The time for three key sub‐processes (i.e., review, response, and publication) also affected journal selection.…”

Mapping the Literature on Academic Publishing: A Bibliometric Analysis on WOS

“…The research fronts are inspired and raised from the common intellectual base. Through the function of cluster exploration of CiteSpace, the research fronts could be drawn, including predatory publishing (Perlin et al, 2018), academic publishing (Lillis et al, 2010), global sociology (Sorokin, 2018), behavioral disorders (Cook, 2016), whipping boys (Hess & Hoerndlein, 2015;Kingsley & Kennan, 2015a, 2015b, academic librarians (Baro & Eze, 2017;Bosah et al, 2017), linguistic injustice (Hyland, 2016), and open access publishing (Weckowska et al, 2017;Zhu, 2017). Timeline visualization in CiteSpace depicts clusters along horizontal timelines (C. Chen, 2017, p. 15).…”