Investigating Open Access Publishing Practices of Early and Mid‐Career Researchers in Humanities and Social Sciences Disciplines

Abstract

AbstractAlthough open access (OA) to research outputs has been proven to improve research readership, citation, and impact, the uptake of OA in some disciplines has remained low. In this paper, we investigated and compared OA publishing practices of early career and mid‐career researchers in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) disciplines in Canada. The descriptive survey design with the use of online questionnaire was employed. Participants were drawn from a group of 15 public research universities via their openly available emails on university websites. Survey data was analyzed with descriptive and inferential statistics. Findings show that in the last three years, 74.1% of mid‐career researchers have published in OA journals, compared to 63.1% of early career researchers. However, OA publishing of monographs (21.3%) and conference proceedings (29.9%), as well as the frequency and extent OA publishing remains low among all participants. ANOVA results (F [2, 218] = 3.683, p = .027, 𝜂2 = .033) showed that 3.3% of the variance in researchers' OA publishing frequency can be attributed to their disciplines. Overall, OA publishing among researchers in the HASS disciplines is still low. Hence, there is a need to identify factors that facilitate or hinder HASS researchers' OA publishing.