Exploring the Willingness of Scholars to Accept Open Access: A Grounded Theory Approach

Abstract

This article aims to explore what factors increase or decrease scholars' willingness to publish and use articles in open-access journals and discusses how these factors are related to one another. Research-oriented publications on the topic of open-access journals have been few, and there is widespread concern about whether scholars will adopt this new form of scholarly communication. The growing number of open-access journals leads scholars to encounter decision-making situations in which they must choose one journal among multiple alternatives, including open access and non-open access. We conducted open-ended and semi-structured in-depth interviews with eight faculty members and six doctoral students at Syracuse University. Based on the interview transcripts, willingness factors and their relationships were identified and refined using the iterative steps of grounded theory approach proposed by Strauss and Corbin in the 1998 edition of their Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. The findings show seven factors (perceived journal reputation, perceived topical relevance, perceived availability, perceived career benefit, perceived cost, perceived content quality, and perceived ease of use) and eight relationships. There were six positive and two negative relationships. The factors and relationships were then compared to the relevant literature to increase internal validity and generalizability of the study. Both theoretical and practical implications of the research are discussed. Theoretically, this study broadens the scope of relevance criteria studies, first identifies the relationship between two important scholarly communication activities, conceptually contributes to the concept of open access, and applies literature comparison methodology in a pure qualitative study to increase internal validity and generalizability.

Open Access Journals and Academics' Behavior

“…Another result worth noting in Table 5 is the reasons given by academics for choosing an OA journal rather than a RA journal. First of all, the number of papers published in OA journals decreases with the worsening perceived quality of OA journals compared to that of RA journals (the relative odds ratio is approximately 0.9), and this is consistent with the findings reported in the literature (e.g., Hubbard, Hodgson, and Fuchs 2011;Park and Qin 2007). Still, there are two other elements which are positively and significantly correlated with the number of OA publications: the first is the perception that OA journals provide access to a wider audience and a greater number of citations 21 ; the second factor is the degree of popularity of OA journals within the 20.…”

“…On the whole, peer‐reviewed journals provide an immediate, even if imperfect, signal that can be converted into reputation, prestige, and the entire attendant benefits for individual researchers. Generally, as far as publication choice is concerned, scholars tend to favor “safe investments”—either by virtue of their history, or because they are regarded as such by the scholar's scientific community (Clemens et al ; Park and Qin ). This gives rise to a self‐perpetuating rigidity and inertia in the prestige of journals, and so also in researchers' publication choices, which can only be broken by some external intervention, random shock, or purpose‐designed policy that has the effect of altering perceptions and hence the decisions of individuals.…”

“…This suggests the hypothesis that, in the absence of clear indicators, the choice of preferring traditional journals (generally RA) is a behavior aimed at minimizing risk under the currently existing social norms. Such a hypothesis could provide a reasonable explanation for an intriguing ambivalence observed in various studies, which might be termed the "Open Access Paradox": scholars generally express strong support for OA, but do not subsequently transfer this enthusiasm to their publication choices (Hubbard, Hodgson, and Fuchs 2011;Park and Qin 2007).…”

Faculty Rights to Scholarly Research

“…In open access publishing, an author chooses to publish in one of the growing number of open access journals, which are made freely available online from the moment of publication (Bailey, 2006). Open access journals serve as direct competition for traditional for-profit publishers, but a respected open access journal must exist in the author' s field in order for open access publishing to be a viable option (Park & Qin, 2007). Many open access journals charge a fee for publication as a replacement for subscription income; while some grant funders are beginning to cover those costs, access to money to pay publication fees vary widely by discipline (Solomon & Björk, 2012).…”

Making Institutional Repositories Work

“…(Park & Qin, 2007) These connections illustrate the complexity of why it has been and continues to be difficult to convince some faculty in some disciplines to change their behaviors and attitudes regarding OA. Finally, Rodriguez addresses generational differences, another anecdotal rationale for nonparticipation in open access, and finds that the results "suggest that faculty authors are not prejudged by their age or tenure status as to their perception of or experience with OA, because these indicators do not appear to be strong predictors" (Rodriguez, 2014).…”