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 before all disciplines fully and relatively homogeneously implemented OA. Recent large-scale bibliometric studies show, however, that the uptake of OA differs substantially across disciplines. 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. Estimated OA levels for publication years after 2010 varied between 29.4% and 66%. The shift towards OA is 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 rooted 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.

The gender gap in commenting: Women are less likely than men to comment on (men’s) published research

“…In economics, for example, it is common to publish working papers, and these can be cited more often than the corresponding publication [31]. Some fields are more willing to consider open access publication than others [32] and some disciplines value books [33] more than journal articles. Perhaps commenting is simply more likely in some fields than others (see also [8] on field differences in publication).…”

Drivers and Obstacles of Open Access Publishing. A Qualitative Investigation of Individual and Institutional Factors

“…With the growing relevance of OA models, the determinants of scientists' publishing attitudes and behaviours have received considerable scholarly interest (Rowley et al, 2017;Severin et al, 2020). Overall, however, the research field presents itself as rather scattered and a comprehensive understanding of why scientists decide (not) to publish in an Open Access journal is still lacking.…”

“…Building on previous research in this area (Kuballa et al, 2019), the present study aims to address these gaps by providing an in-depth investigation of an exemplary research discipline that is particularly affected by transitions to OA (Severin et al, 2020). We conducted group discussions and interviews with medical informatics researchers located in all parts of the world and with different levels of seniority in order to obtain a comprehensive picture of their perceptions, motivations and behaviours regarding OA publishing.…”

Revisiting “the 1990s debutante”: Scholar‐led publishing and the prehistory of the open access movement

“…Open access publishing (OA) is rapidly changing the ways academics communicate their research. Not only has uptake of OA increased drastically in recent years (Severin, Egger, Eve, & Hürlimann, ), it is also now firmly on the policy agenda for governments across the world (Else, ) and for libraries looking to reduce expenditure on journal subscriptions (Gaind, ). OA is also big business for commercial publishers, who make millions each year from article‐processing charges (APCs) levied to funders and researchers in order to make their research freely available to the public, with Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer‐Nature taking almost half of the total APC revenue to date (OpenAPC, n.d.).…”

“…It is also often assumed that the origins of OA are in the sciences and that the humanities have come “late” to OA (Mandler, , p. 166). Certainly, uptake of OA is most prevalent in scientific disciplines and least prevalent in the arts and humanities (Severin et al, ). Further still, many of the highly successful OA projects, such as the arXiv, BioMedCentral, PubMedCentral, and the Public Library of Science, originated in the sciences.…”