Abstract
Open Access (OA) is an evolving publication model that is heavily supported by politics and science organizations aiming to make scientific knowledge more accessible to a wider audience. Whether it will indeed alter scholarly communication, however, depends on researchers’ underlying attitudes, motivations and needs. Drawing on group discussions and interviews (n = 42), this study explores the perceptions, attitudes and behaviours of researchers towards OA publishing. We focus on researchers in the field of biomedical and health informatics located in different global regions and from different seniority levels. Overall, the results show that whilst most researchers support the idea of making scientific knowledge freely accessible to everyone, they are hesitant about actually living this practice by choosing OA journals to publish their own work. Article processing charges and quality issues are perceived as the main obstacles in this respect, revealing a two-sided evaluation of OA models, reflecting the different viewpoints of researchers as authors or readers. The results further highlight hitherto underexplored influencing factors regarding institutional frame conditions, located on the level of the scientific system, the publication service providers or the national/international OA policies.
Highlights
The dissemination of findings and ideas is an integral part of scientific research
The open approach allows us to reveal new and hitherto disregarded aspects pertaining to the perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours of this research community regarding Open Access (OA) publishing as the respondents have the opportunity to talk about their own experiences in detail, especially with regard to institutional frame conditions, level of
The majority of the 42 medical informatics researchers that participated in this study has already published in an OA journal
Summary
The dissemination of findings and ideas is an integral part of scientific research. Academic journals are important venues in this respect, as they create a public record of knowledge that shapes the development of disciplines, and form a core component of scholarly communication—within and beyond the scientific community (Hyland, 2016). This is most evident in the development of Open Access (OA) models. Founded in niche areas by small initiatives embracing the idea of sharing knowledge freely on the web (Dalton et al, 2020), the notion that (publicly funded) research should be publicly available to all interested parties has become a global movement. The gold road ( known as gold OA) refers to the primary publication of scientific work either in a genuine OA journal or by choosing the OA option offered by a subscription-based journal. We focus on the perceived drivers and obstacles of publishing in gold OA models
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