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The determinants of open access publishing: survey evidence from countries in the Mediterranean Open Access Network (MedOANet)

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Abstract

We discuss the results of a survey conducted between March 2013 and May 2014 in six Mediterranean countries and covering 2528 researchers from France (380), Italy (596), Spain (1291), Portugal (142), Greece (130) and Turkey (131). We compare the results with those of a survey on Germany, conducted in 2012, with 1913 respondents. We show that there are significant differences between the scientific disciplines with respect to researcher’s awareness of and experience with both open access journals and self-archiving. We conclude by discussing our results in the light of the MedOANet policies which seek to foster open access publishing.

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Notes

  1. See Lunney (2008) for an analysis of the effects of digital technologies on the ability to price-discriminate in the market for information goods. Yuan (2010) points out that digital technologies have facilitated the process of collecting customer information and reduced the costs of customization, versioning and bundling strategies (see also, e.g., Shapiro and Varian 1998; Ulph and Vulkan 2000).

  2. Digitization has at least three far reaching implications for copyright law: (1) digital information can be shared without the need for any physical media such as paper or CD’s, (2) a digital copy is a perfect substitute for the original, (3) digitization reduces the marginal costs for copying to virtually zero. See Eger and Scheufen (2012) for a historical reflection on the linkage between technological change and the evolution of copyright.

  3. We also checked whether there are effects of the timing of the survey on our empirical findings, since there are about 1.5 years between the start of the German survey and the termination of the least Mediterranean one. However, the basic results of our paper are not affected by timing effects.

  4. On the reputation of OA journals, in general, see Mueller-Langer and Scheufen (2013). For the reputation of OA journals in the field of Economics, see Migheli and Ramello (2014). On the importance of the author fee in the author’s decision to submit to an OA journal, see West et al. (2014).

  5. As outlined, we follow Harnad et al. (2004) by distinguishing between the gold and green road. The questionnaire incorporates a definition for OA journals (gold road) as defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Online repositories or self-archiving platforms (green road) are defined more generally as a platform for depositing pre- and/or post-print versions of un-/published works, as the publishing culture regarding repositories differs considerably between disciplines regarding the format of self-archived works. That is, our definitions allow gold and green road to be both complements as well as substitutes. Additional questions seek to identify determinants for the publishing culture by discipline.

  6. In “Mathematics & Statistics” and “Physics & Astronomy” respondents most often referred to “arXiv.org”, while “RePEc.org” and “SSRN” are platforms commonly used by economists.

  7. Please also note that we also offered the item “I don’t know” as a possible answer. The data was dropped for these cases.

  8. Especially a comparison of these two fields is interesting as their publishing cultures differ considerably. Regarding the distance between relevance and awareness one may even believe that OA journals are of less relevance in Economics as researchers provide free access to their works, whereas the very opposite holds in Biology. In other words, one could argue that OA journals and repositories are substitutes in some respect, providing evidence for a chicken-egg problem that is discussed by, e.g., Hanauske et al. (2007).

  9. Please note that we also asked each respondent to indicate the degree to which he or she uses OA journals or online repositories, respectively. In particular, we asked to indicate whether he/she provides OA (gold road, green road) to (1) <10 %, (2) between 10 and 25 %, (3) between 25 and 50 %, (4) between 50 and 75 % or to (5) more than 75 % of his/her academic works.

  10. See appendix for the descriptive statistics for each of the six MedOANet countries (Figs. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).

  11. For example, the Public Library of Science (PLOS) publishes a number of OA journals in the fields of medicine and life sciences, with publication fees between 1350 and 2900 US-$ after acceptance.

  12. Mueller-Langer and Scheufen (2013) highlight that the impact factor or OA journals differs considerably between the different disciplines. Accordingly, in fields like Biology, Health Science or Physics there exists. OA journals which are competitive as compared to CA journals for the respective fields, whereas in other fields (e.g. Economics) CA journals still exhibit a significant impact factor advantage. See also Migheli and Ramello (2014) on the impact factor for OA journals in Economics. Liebowitz (2014) analyzes the inefficiencies that result from the “publish or perish” environment that characterizes the reward structure in science.

  13. Throughout this contribution, we treat categorical variables as continuous for three reasons. First, it is common practice to use categorical variables as continuous when many intervals are considered. Second, doing so makes the interpretation easier, while also reducing collinearity problems. Finally, likelihood ratio tests do not show that replacing the continuous variables with indicator variables (where dummies correspond to each category) adds information to our models. In other words, the likelihood ratio tests suggest that the categories we consider are equally spaced and can thus be considered as continuous variables.

  14. The respondents were also asked to evaluate the effect of OA publishing on the possibility that their papers are cited and on their overall visibility as researchers. We do not control for these variables as they are highly correlated with respondents’ evaluations of the expected effect of OA publishing on their readership so as to avoid collinearity problems.

  15. We are thankful to a reviewer for pointing out this issue.

  16. Again, this effect is not significant for the Mediterranean countries only.

  17. http://www.medoanet.eu/sites/www.medoanet.eu/files/documents/MED2013_GUIDELine_dp_EN_ws.pdf.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Law and Economics, Johnsallee 35, 20148, Hamburg, Germany

    Thomas Eger

  2. Ruhr University Bochum, BF 8.9, Massenbergstr. 11, 44787, Bochum, Germany

    Marc Scheufen

  3. Albert Ludwigs University Freiburg, Wilhelmstr. 1b, 79098, Freiburg, Germany

    Daniel Meierrieks

Authors
  1. Thomas Eger
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  2. Marc Scheufen
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  3. Daniel Meierrieks
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Thomas Eger.

Additional information

We wish to thank two anonymous referees for their valuable comments. Furthermore, we want to thank Meltem Bayramli, Emanuela Carbonara, Elisabete Castro, Maria Cecilia Dómine, Elif Erdemoglu, Daniela Ferreira, Ariane Garciabueno, Ann-Kathrin Hengevoß, Iris de Orte Julvez, Angeliki Karakoliou, Vaia Karapanou, Konstantinos Pilpilidis, André and Chantal Plaster for research assistance.

Appendix

Appendix

See Figs. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Fig. 2
figure 2

Open access in France. Note The horizontal axis illustrates two issues. The first row shows the number of respondents in the respective field. The second row indicates the field of research or discipline following the categorization of the “Directory of Open Access Journals” (DOAJ), where Agri, Agriculture and Food Science; Art, Arts and Architecture; Bio, Biology and Life Science; Bus, Business and Economics; Chem, Chemistry; Earth, Earth and Environmental Science; Health, Health Science; Hist, History and Archeology; Lang, Language and Literature; LaPo, Law and Political Science; Math, Mathematics and Statistics; Phil, Philosophy and Religion; Phys, Physics and Astronomy; Social, Social Science; Tech, Technology and Engineering

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Fig. 3
figure 3

Open access in Italy. Note The horizontal axis illustrates two issues. The first row shows the number of respondents in the respective field. The second row indicates the field of research or discipline following the categorization of the “Directory of Open Access Journals” (DOAJ), where Agri, Agriculture and Food Science; Art, Arts and Architecture; Bio, Biology and Life Science; Bus, Business and Economics; Chem, Chemistry; Earth, Earth and Environmental Science; Health, Health Science; Hist, History and Archeology; Lang, Language and Literature; LaPo, Law and Political Science; Math, Mathematics and Statistics; Phil, Philosophy and Religion; Phys, Physics and Astronomy; Social, Social Science; Tech, Technology and Engineering

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Fig. 4
figure 4

Open access in Spain. Note The horizontal axis illustrates two issues. The first row shows the number of respondents in the respective field. The second row indicates the field of research or discipline following the categorization of the “Directory of Open Access Journals” (DOAJ), where Agri, Agriculture and Food Science; Art, Arts and Architecture; Bio, Biology and Life Science; Bus, Business and Economics; Chem, Chemistry; Earth, Earth and Environmental Science; Health, Health Science; Hist, History and Archeology; Lang, Language and Literature; LaPo, Law and Political Science; Math, Mathematics and Statistics; Phil, Philosophy and Religion; Phys, Physics and Astronomy; Social, Social Science; Tech, Technology and Engineering

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Fig. 5
figure 5

Open Access in Portugal. Note The horizontal axis illustrates two issues. The first row shows the number of respondents in the respective field. The second row indicates the field of research or discipline following the categorization of the “Directory of Open Access Journals” (DOAJ), where Agri, Agriculture and Food Science; Art, Arts and Architecture; Bio, Biology and Life Science; Bus, Business and Economics; Chem, Chemistry; Earth, Earth and Environmental Science; Health, Health Science; Hist, History and Archeology; Lang, Language and Literature; LaPo, Law and Political Science; Math, Mathematics and Statistics; Phil, Philosophy and Religion; Phys, Physics and Astronomy; Social, Social Science; Tech, Technology and Engineering

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Fig. 6
figure 6

Open access in Greece. Note The horizontal axis illustrates two issues. The first row shows the number of respondents in the respective field. The second row indicates the field of research or discipline following the categorization of the “Directory of Open Access Journals” (DOAJ), where Agri, Agriculture and Food Science; Art, Arts and Architecture; Bio, Biology and Life Science; Bus, Business and Economics; Chem, Chemistry; Earth, Earth and Environmental Science; Health, Health Science; Hist, History and Archeology; Lang, Language and Literature; LaPo, Law and Political Science; Math, Mathematics and Statistics; Phil, Philosophy and Religion; Phys, Physics and Astronomy; Social, Social Science; Tech, Technology and Engineering

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Fig. 7
figure 7

Open access in Turkey. Note The horizontal axis illustrates two issues. The first row shows the number of respondents in the respective field. The second row indicates the field of research or discipline following the categorization of the “Directory of Open Access Journals” (DOAJ), where Agri, Agriculture and Food Science; Art, Arts and Architecture; Bio, Biology and Life Science; Bus, Business and Economics; Chem, Chemistry; Earth, Earth and Environmental Science; Health, Health Science; Hist, History and Archeology; Lang, Language and Literature; LaPo, Law and Political Science; Math, Mathematics and Statistics; Phil, Philosophy and Religion; Phys, Physics and Astronomy; Social, Social Science; Tech, Technology and Engineering

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Eger, T., Scheufen, M. & Meierrieks, D. The determinants of open access publishing: survey evidence from countries in the Mediterranean Open Access Network (MedOANet). Econ Polit Ind 43, 463–489 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40812-016-0027-8

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