Discipline-specific open access publishing practices and barriers to change: an evidence-based review

Abstract

Background: Many of the discussions surrounding Open Access (OA) revolve around how it affects publishing practices across different academic disciplines. It was a long-held view that it would be only a matter of time for all disciplines to fully and relatively homogeneously implement OA. Recent large-scale bibliometric studies show however that the uptake of OA differs substantially across disciplines. This study investigates the underlying mechanisms that cause disciplines to vary in their OA publishing practices. We aimed to answer two questions: First, how do different disciplines adopt and shape OA publishing practices? Second, what discipline-specific barriers to and potentials for OA can be identified? Methods: In a first step, we identified and synthesized relevant bibliometric studies that assessed OA prevalence and publishing patterns across disciplines. In a second step, and adopting a social shaping of technology perspective, we studied evidence on the socio-technical forces that shape OA publishing practices. We examined a variety of data sources, including, but not limited to, publisher policies and guidelines, OA mandates and policies and author surveys. Results: Over the last three decades, scholarly publishing has experienced a shift from “closed” access to OA as the proportion of scholarly literature that is openly accessible has increased continuously. The shift towards OA is however uneven across disciplines in two respects: first, the growth of OA has been uneven across disciplines, which manifests itself in varying OA prevalence levels. Second, disciplines use different OA publishing channels to make research outputs OA. Conclusions: We conclude that historically grown publishing practices differ in terms of their compatibility with OA, which is the reason why OA can be assumed to be a natural continuation of publishing cultures in some disciplines, whereas in other disciplines, the implementation of OA faces major barriers and would require a change of research culture.

Open access journal publishing in the business disciplines: A closer look at the low uptake and discipline-specific considerations

“…Academics, in particular, fields of science tend to have a little publishing and reviewing experience in other fields and might assume that the peer review and publishing modalities look the same also in other fields. This perspective was also adopted for an analysis based on five analytical dimensions by Severin et al (2020): Author behavior and attitudes, publisher behavior and policies, infrastructures of scholarly communication channels, structural and institutional factors, and OA mandates and policies. The authors compared the differences that could be perceived in these dimensions for the medical sciences, the natural and technical sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, and law.…”

Introduction

“…However, it is precisely because of the prominence of more narrowly economic, administrative, and instrumentally "policyrelevant" knowledge cultures that we have sought to surface other lines of inquiry and ways of making sense of the histories, contexts, conditions, and futures of scholarly production. 31…”

The changed – and changing – landscape of serials publishing: Review of the literature on emerging models

“…However, later developments, most notably the growing unsustainability of the high APCs set by publishers, the change in governmental policy to the acceptance of green OA as an alternative to gold OA, and the decrease in publisher embargoes, rendered repositories a central component of the OA publishing scene. Indeed, as Severin, Egger, Eve, and Hürlimann (2018) found, these days, most OA is published via the green route, that is, as journal articles for which the accepted or the published version can be retrieved from an open repository.…”