Who support open access publishing? Gender, discipline, seniority and other factors associated with academics’ OA practice

Open access publishing has been a much discussed mechanism for an open science approach over the last decade. One major rationale of open access publishing is that the public should have free access to publicly funded research. Because a paywall leads to a situation where the public cannot use restricted reliable information in the form of peer reviewed academic research and instead may trust potentially unreliable information from the Internet (Gray 2009). Open access to scientific publications can help the public access reliable information from research outputs. Another rationale of OA publishing is related to the publishing crisis and the criticism of publishers making profit from academic publishing. Academic libraries face a crisis that has continued for many years (McGuigan and Russel 2008). Academic authors and scholars usually provide the content as well as peer reviewing and editorial services to scholarly journals and they are commonly unpaid by the journals. The universities purchase the journals and pay salaries to academic authors and editors whilst the publishers make profit on providing access to the journals. After the shift of paper format to electronic format, publishers of academic journals started to offer site licenses for online access to academic institutions (Björk 2004). Since there is very little competition in academic publishing, the subscription price continues to rise. In protest against the high subscription costs of mainstream publishers, a growing number of researchers, institutions and funding bodies have started open access journals and online repositories which are freely accessible online (Björk 2004).

The two main open access channels are commonly referred to as Gold OA and Green OA. Gold OA refers to online journal articles which are either totally or to some extent made freely accessible to the public by the publishers (Laakso et al. 2011). Most Gold OA publishers require Article Processing Charge (APC) which cost authors approximately 3000 USD for their articles to be published with unlimited online access (Björk et al. 2010; Willinsky 2010). Green OA refers to the self-archiving of an author’s research article or an earlier version of the manuscript (Crow 2008; Laakso 2014). Green OA articles are supplied by the authors on a web site that is freely available without publisher mediation (Pinfield 2003). Research articles can be deposited in institutional repositories, subject-based repositories or authors’ own websites (Björk 2004).

OA publishing not only benefits the general public by offering free access of scientific content but also provides potential benefits for individual authors. The most discussed potential advantage of OA publishing is related to OA articles’ citation impact. Since the first study by Lawrence (2001) suggested a citation advantage of OA articles, many studies on OA articles’ citation impact have been conducted (Craig et al. 2007). Earlier studies of citation impact have mostly focused on the effect of Green OA and generally indicated that self-archiving of scientific publications can lead to increases in the number of article citations (Metcalfe 2005, 2006; Schwarz and Kennicutt 2004). Other studies of Green OA suggested that early view effects and self-selection of posting high quality work are responsible for the citation effect rather than OA status (Davis and Fromerth 2007; Henneken et al. 2006; Kurtz et al. 2005; Moed 2007). As for Gold OA, a number of studies found OA advantage while comparing OA articles with non-OA articles from the same journal (Davis 2009; Eysenbach 2006; Sotudeh et al. 2015; Wang et al. 2015). Others found little evidence for citation impact of Gold OA articles after taking account of a full set of control variables (Calver and Bradley 2010; Gaule and Maystre 2011). Gaule and Maystre (2011) suggested that OA citation impact might be explained by selection bias as authors of higher quality papers were more likely to choose open access in hybrid journals. Selection bias was also suggested by McCabe and Snyder (2014), who analysed a panel of science journal articles moving from paid to open access after controlling for article quality. They identified a small citation impact of OA status for top-ranked journals, but citation deduction for bottom-ranked journals. No citation advantage was found by Davis and colleagues, who designed a randomised controlled trial which randomly assigned OA status to articles in various online subscription-based journal articles and eliminated the influence of the early view effects and selection bias (Davis 2011; Davis and Walters 2011). However, OA availability was found to have led to more downloads (Davis 2010; Davis et al. 2008). Regardless of the cause for OA articles’ citation advantage, most studies suggest that OA status may contribute to a higher visibility and more readerships.

In the UK, a number of research councils have had open access policies since 2005. From April 2013, Research Council UK’s (RCUK) open access policy came into effect which required RCUK-funded research to be published either through open access journals or self-archiving (RCUK 2013). RCUK arranged to pay block grants to universities and other institutions to support the cost of APC for publishing in Gold OA journals. Many universities also started institutional repositories to support Green OA model (e.g. PURE for University of Bristol¹ and ORA for Oxford University²). In July 2014, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) also introduced an open access policy which applies to research outputs accepted for publication after 1 April 2016 in relation to the research assessments after the 2014 REF.

However, OA publishing had not been a norm for academics. Back in 2006 many academics seemed to be unaware of the concept of open access or chose to remain ignorant of its implications in spite of having heard of the term (Swan 2006). A number of studies of institutional repositories across the United States, West Europe and Australia suggest that academics had little awareness of opportunities for self-archiving in digital repositories, and that a large percentage of documents in those repositories were deposited by a librarian or administrative staff (Kim 2011; Xia 2007; Xia and Sun 2007). By 2010, over 1200 online repositories were publically accessible world-wide, potentially allowing free access to at least half of current academic literature; however, authors have not participated in self-archiving in large numbers (Willinsky 2010). Björk et al. (2010) found that only 12% of all scholarly papers published in 2008 were freely accessible through some form of Green OA. Many UK based academics might not be aware of the existence of OA repositories or RCUK’s OA policy.

For Gold OA, academics were concerned that new OA journals did not have sufficient impact in their field (Swan and Brown 2004). Although major academic publishers provide OA author-pay options for those prestigious subscription based journals, the high cost of APCs is a barrier for non-funded academics. The author-pays model can also lead to quality control issues and poor or fake peer review process with OA journals (Bohannon 2013). An international survey of senior researchers found that authors’ major concerns regarding which journals to publish in are favourably associated with the ‘reputation of the journal’, its ‘readership’ and its ‘impact factor’ (Rowlands and Nicholas 2006). In contrast, the level of open access to a journal and the ability to deposit preprint or post-print in a repository were considered to be of relatively low importance. Hence many academics may not regard OA publishing as important. Moreover, in academia, the dominant idea has been established that science is too difficult and complex for the lay public audience to understand (Bucchi 2004). Davies (2008) also found that majority of scientists and engineers in her study viewed the constructions of science communication as one-way and negative. Hence, some scientists may hold negative views towards making articles freely accessible to the general public as scholarly articles could be misunderstood by non-academic audience.

Various studies found disciplinary differences in OA publishing. Open access journals have been well-developed in Medical and Life Sciences compared to other discipline areas (Björk et al. 2010). In Humanities, there were lower levels of availability for OA journal (Darley et al. 2014). While scientific journal articles are the dominant publication form for academics in Medical and Natural Sciences, monographs were found to have great value for career advancement and cited far more frequently than journal articles in the Arts and Humanities (Thompson 2002; Williams et al. 2009). Compared to the availability of OA journals, open access monograph is far less common and is in great need of a sustainable business model in order to survive the monograph publishing crisis (Look and Pinter 2010). With regard to Green OA model, open access repositories are more established in Natural Sciences. In Physical and Mathematical Sciences, a subject-based repository called arXiv,³ is frequently used for depositing research articles (Björk 2004). There are a number of established subject-based repositories in Social Sciences, such as the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) and Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR). Open access repositories in Humanities are less established or administrated at a small scale by individual libraries or departments.

This study drew data from a large scale survey, which was one of the first of its kind to look at UK academics’ attitudes towards open science. However the study does have limitations. The survey only sampled half of the Russell Group universities and emails were only collected from those who had a profile on their institution’s website. Those who did not have emails on the university websites would have been absent from the study because of the sampling strategy. The response rate was only 4.4%, although that is common for this type of online survey. As this study only surveyed Russell Group universities, the results cannot represent academics from all institutions in the UK. Although over half of the respondents who produced research articles reported experience of at least one of the two OA publish channels, the proportions of publications they have published in OA journal or deposited in repositories were not clear. Moreover, because it was not a random sample, the analysis cannot establish causal pathways. For example, positive personal views towards the OA citation advantage may not be the cause that someone had published in OA channels. Positive views could be caused by positive experiences of OA publishing where the authors may have noticed increased readership and citations. Future research with a random sample would provide a more representative picture of academics’ OA practice. However this will also require more manpower and funding for data collection. Robust methodologies are needed to capture academics’ various scholarly communication practices over time.

As the research assessments after the 2014 REF requires research outputs accepted for publication after 1 April 2016 to comply with HEFCE’s open access policy, it is clear that open access publishing is going to be a major factor in UK academia. The awareness of OA policy and OA repositories is highly important for enhancing the use of Gold and Green OA. The survey results suggested that many academics had little awareness of the existence of OA repositories or RCUK’s OA policy. There were also significant differences between academics from various universities in terms of their awareness of OA policy and experience with OA publishing. Respondents in universities with greater awareness of RCUK’s OA policy were more likely to report experiences with Gold and Green OA publishing. This indicates that the promotion for OA policy for some Russell Groups institutions had not yet been enforced. Institutions with their own OA repositories need to promote their service to be known and understood by more academics if they want their service to be fully used. Institutions without OA repositories need to find alternative methods to help their academic staff comply with RCUK and HEFCE’s OA policies in the future. As HEFCE’s OA policy is related to the research assessments post 2014 REF, UK higher education institutions need to promote OA policy in order to ensure that it is known and understood by academics including those who are not funded by RCUK or HEFCE but who might be in the future. Institutions should reinforce these OA polices to academics through various channels including training especially for those at the start of their careers such as PhD students and research assistants who are more likely to be unaware of those policies as suggested by the findings of this study.

This study found that academics who had self-archived their research articles were not necessarily convinced that doing so would increase the number of citations. Incentives seem to be very important to academics’ publishing practice. Citation impact is highly relevant to academics’ career advancement and it is clear more robust analysis is needed for investigating the citation effects of OA articles. Other impacts of OA publishing need to be studied. For example, has the increase of OA availability helped the public learn about science and improved the public’s satisfaction with science communication? Once positive and reliable impacts of OA publishing are found, funders and academic institutions need to inform academics along with mandatory OA policies.

One of the concerns of publishing in Gold OA is the quality of new OA journals. Since the quality of new OA journals may still be uncertain to many academics, research funding bodies could have guidelines for what kind of journals academics should or should not consider. It is clear that open access journals need to be quality assured in the same way that closed access journals are, including the peer review process.

This paper provides some insights into the question of who have supported OA publishing. A further question for follow-up research may be how to help researchers better understand and use OA publishing.