Managing the transition to open access publishing: a psychological perspective

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/08109028.2017.1408289
• Published date: 01 June 2017
• Date: 01 June 2017
• Pages: 111-135
• Author: Dagmara M. Weckowska,Nadine Levin,Sabina Leonelli,John Dupré,David Castle

https://doi.org/10.1080/08109028.2017.1408289

RESEARCH PAPER

Managing the transition to open access publishing: a

psychological perspective

Dagmara M.Weckowskaa,b, NadineLevinc, SabinaLeonellid, JohnDupréd and

DavidCastlee

aDepartment of Business and Management, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK; bInnogen Institute, University

of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK; cInstitute for Society and Genetics, University of California Los Angeles, Los

Angeles CA, US; dExeter Centre for the Study of Life Sciences (Egenis) and Department of Sociology, Philosophy

and Anthropology, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK; eSchool of Public Administration, University of Victoria,

Victoria BC, Canada

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 dierences within disciplines. The study adopts

a psychological perspective to elucidate motivations, capabilities and

opportunities for OA publishing among bioscientists in the UK. To

identify dierences within the discipline, bioscientists with starkly

dierent 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 dier. One group is strongly

motivated by their moral convictions and beliefs in benets 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 dierences within the discipline suggest

that bioscientists are unlikely to respond to OA policies in the same

way and, thus, the appropriateness of one-size-ts-all OA policies is

questioned.

Introduction

e knowledge transfer channels among universities, industry and other users have been

the topic of much investigation in recent decades (Perkmann et al., 2013; Azagra-Caro et al.,

2017). Studies have examined closed disclosure practices related to the commercialisation

of academic inventions (e.g. Gao and Haworth, 2016), open disclosure practices such as

publications (Kapeller and Steinerberger, 2016) and, more recently, production of open data

© 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/

licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

CONTACT Dagmara M. Weckowska d.m.weckowska@sussex.ac.uk

Accepting editor: Robin Mansell

OPEN ACCESS

Prometheus

2017, VOL. 35, NO. 2, 111–135

(Perkmann and Schildt, 2015). As the academic publishing industry undergoes signicant

changes driven by the open access (OA) mandates of public research funders (Harvie et al.,

2013; Beverungen et al., 2013), OA publishing is emerging as a new knowledge disclosure

practice (Houghton and Oppenheim, 2010; Suber, 2012). is new practice makes research

outputs openly and freely accessible and, it is believed, makes it easier to evaluate, replicate

and build upon knowledge produced by others and, thus, to facilitate scientic and techno-

logical advancements and the mobilisation of knowledge for social and economic benets

(Gaulé and Maystre, 2011; McKiernan et al., 2016; European Commission, 2016). Academics

in the science, technology and innovation (STI) eld have begun to investigate OA in this

context; however, the amount of research remains small and the ndings shed little light

on how the transition from the traditional to the OA model of academic publishing can

be managed. For instance, what kind of policies and other interventions are appropriate

for governments, research funders, universities and publishers to encourage the adoption

of OA publishing in academia? is paper aims to shed some light on how this transition

should be managed.

We argue that changing the publishing behaviour of academics is a major challenge

in the transition to the OA model of academic publishing. Traditionally, scientists have

had little control over readers’ abilities to access or re-use their published research papers.

However, OA publishing is making it possible to ensure that readers have free access. OA in

the context of published research requires behavioural change. To provide repository-me-

diated OA, researchers need to provide an appropriate version of their manuscript for the

relevant repository (e.g. PubMed Central, arXiv, bioRxiv) without violating the publisher’s

rules. In some disciplines, the publisher/journal is responsible for depositing the published

papers in the relevant discipline-specic repository (e.g. many biomedical and life sciences

journals use PubMed Central); however, it is more common for this responsibility to lie

with the author. According to SHERPA/RoMEO1 (2017), 80% of journals allow authors to

archive a pre-print (i.e. a pre-refereed dra) and/or a post-print (i.e. a nal dra post-referee

review); in 2014, only 1.3% of papers worldwide were made accessible through this route

(Jubb et al., 2015). Another option is to provide journal-mediated OA in fully OA or hybrid

journals. Authors may have to pay a publisher’s article processing charge (APC) to make

their paper openly accessible from the journal’s website. Jubb et al. (2015) estimate that,

in 2014, 16.6% of peer-reviewed research papers worldwide were immediately accessible

from a journal website, including 9.6% in APC-charging fully OA journals, 4.6% in fully

OA journals with no APC, and 2.4% in APC-charging hybrid journals. In the UK, some

universities have developed centralised processes for paying the APC to selected publishers,

but academics are required to check with their employing university whether their paper is

eligible for institutional funds. us, providing APC-based journal-mediated OA remains

slightly more onerous for academics than non-OA publishing. Publishers enabling OA have

tested alternative user-pays and author-pays business models, such as: (a) OpenEdition’s

freemium model (where some content in HTML format is available free of charge while

users have to pay a premium for other formats and some exclusive content), (b) PeerJ’s mem-

bership model (until 2016) (where authors pay a one-time membership fee for the right to

publish in PeerJ OA journals), and (c) BMJ’s mixed model (where advertising revenues are

combined with an APC paid by the authors or their institutions). While alternative models

are emerging, enabling OA to published research via a repository or APC-charging journal

requires individual behavioural change.

112 D. M. WECKOWSKA ET AL.