A Qualitative Analysis of Open-Access Publishing-Related Posts on Twitter

Abstract

The open-access (OA) discourse is shrouded in controversy and is actively discussed on forums like social media, where scholars engage in professional conversations. The mining of the conversations of the Twitter (X) scholarly community with an open-source intelligence tool for a 7-day time frame yielded a cleaned dataset of 67 posts, which were analyzed and coded into seven major themes. Most Twitter users who participated in the #openaccess discussion were scholars (64%), but (institutions) libraries and publishers, universities, and repositories were also part of the participants in the discourse. The major themes that were identified in the corpus of posts retrieved were article processing charges (25%), repositories (16%), paywalls (15%), support initiatives for OA (15%), definitions of OA (12%), benefits of OA (10%), and OA policies (10%). These themes were found to be of high interest to scholars and in line with contemporary research, based on the volume and tone of the peer-reviewed literature that supports the study. While Twitter (X) can be accepted as an authentic platform for exploring scholarly discourse, such studies can also lean on other forums for scholarly communication such as LinkedIn, Facebook, focus groups, peer-reviewed literature, and institutional policies for a well-rounded exploration of the evolving perspectives and practices of OA publishing.