Michael’s comment on my earlier post got me thinking: What are all the factors inhibiting uptake of OA by authors, funders, institutions, and publishers? And how important is each factor?
There’s a folk wisdom about these questions already. How many times have I heard a variation on this sentence:
Authors don’t self-archive / don’t publish in OA journals because…
Stevan Harnad constantly reminds us of what is probably the biggest factor to whether or not authors provide OA to their work: the presence or absence of a (funder or institutional) requirement to self-archive.
But even mandates don’t reach 100% compliance, and maybe never will. (What rule is followed 100% of the time?) Moreover, mandates allow a maximum 6- or 12-month embargo; we want to encourage authors to self-archive as early as possible (e.g., to publish in journals without embargoes). So what other factors are at play, both pre- and post-mandate? This is an important question in the designing of mandates themselves, and in evaluating their effectiveness.
I’ll suggest a few potential factors for authors, just as examples:
- Familiarity with / usage of OA repositories / journals as a reader (if you read papers on arXiv, are you more likely to self-archive there?)
- Familiarity with / knowledge of OA as an idea, the serials crisis, economics of scholarly publishing, etc.
- Familiarity with / knowledge of copyright, authors’ rights, Creative Commons, etc.
- Familiarity / comfort with IT in general, and OA tools (e.g. repositories) in particular
- Resources / support provided by the author’s institution and/or funder
- Information provided by / stance toward OA of societies of which the author is a member
- Colleagues or co-workers who are OA practitioners or advocates
I know work has been done on this: theorizing, quantitative and qualitative surveys, and experiments (or natural experiments). I wonder how comprehensive these have been, and what work has been done to synthesize them. If you have recommended reading, please post a link in the comments. If you’re doing work in this area, or would like to, please post a comment or email me.
The majority of journals allow self-archiving but are not themselves published under an open license. This is the biggest impediment to OA since paper writers are unlikely to do extra work to get their paper online. I described this at length on the Waterloo Students for the Information Commons mailing list:
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/pipermail/wsic/2008-December/000247.html
Among other points, I note that one of the biggest problems with OA and self-archiving is the lack of clear licensing. Many paper writers will self-archive online, but do not place any sort of license on their work, making redistribution illegal.
I also point out some other licensing issues when it comes to software used in papers. Many results are not easily reproducible because of the use of proprietary or improperly-licensed software.
I’d recommend the above mailing list post for anyone interested in OA. Feel free to contact me on the list or via my web site.
Thanks for the article, Gavin. It’s good to get people thinking about this.
Gavin, you need to turn this question around, because the major inhibitor is INERTIA.
What are the factors encouraging (green; you aren’t talking about gold) OA? In the absence of such factors, inertia is only to be expected.
Glad I could be thought-provoking!
To your earlier point, incentives are the key here, and as far as I can tell, there are few reasons for an author TO self-archive or seek publication in an OA journal. This is the same problem as with most public goods (like recycling) wherein the potential participant is largely indifferent to contributing to the good (it doesn’t take much effort to throw a can in a recycling bin or self-archive a pre-print) but can see only minimal impact from abstaining (my newspapers are still made from 100% post-consumer product and there are still lots of freely-available journal articles regardless of what I do). What – other than idealism – would compel the author to publish OA?
What may compound the issue in the case of OA is that most authors belong to institutions that already have access to toll journals. While they understand that there is a cost for those journals, they are, for the most part, disconnected from the purchasing decision and ignorant of the (often extremely high) price. Employees will waste paper at an office even though they know paper costs their employer money that might otherwise go to better benefits or increased wages because the perceived cost is so low and the bearer of the cost (as determined by who makes the purchase) is not themselves. The perceived benefit of contributing to OA is low since the institution will still spend the same on toll journals in the short run regardless of the decision of the author and since the author and his or her colleagues will have access to that article in the short run, OA or not.
Publishing OA has clear long-term benefits, but people are notoriously bad at acting in their long-term best interests. We eat poorly, smoke cigarettes, invest in costly fad mutual funds, and borrow more than we can afford. This is why regulations like cigarette taxes are more effective than warning labels at to curbing bad behaviors: the near-term costs are obvious. This is the same reason that OA mandates are so important at this stage. Even if there’s no penalty for noncompliance, there is a psychological cost to breaking the mandate, so most people comply.
In my opinion, authors would also respond to a visible near-term benefit to publish OA. Show them a product that makes their lives better (a larger audience what will cite them more; faster, easier, cheaper publication; a higher value-add and more transparent peer-review process; more prestige to show foundations) and they’ll change their habits.
In short, authors don’t self-archive / don’t publish in OA journals because they don’t realize they need it (yet).
All, thanks for your questions. I’ll try to respond to them tomorrow — today I was celebrating the inauguration of my country’s new president.
Dorothea, in my response to Michael’s earlier comment, I frame it exactly that way: “The fundamental question is how to overcome the inertia of authors, funders, institutions, and publishers.” I want to know what would encourage more OA and what discourages it.
And I’m interested in both gold and green OA — I just used green OA for most of my examples in this post. I’m mostly agnostic as to the path to OA (not to say I don’t recognize that different routes have different pros and cons).
In fact, that’s kind of my whole point: to encourage stepping back, taking a broad view (based on data to the extent possible), and letting that inform our actions. There’s been a lot of experimenting as to what works and what doesn’t: I’d like to see a comprehensive look at that. I think it could inform a lot of our efforts moving forward.
Denver, you’re right: if more journals were OA — even delayed OA — more articles would be OA. You could think of this as the gold version of Stevan’s Rule 0.
Similarly, clarity and misunderstandings about author’s rights does inhibit self-archiving.
The lack of open licensing is a problem, too, although I’m primarily concerned (first) with gratis OA. I believe in the BBB definition, but I think it’s a higher priority to get research online and gratis. I think once scholarly publications look more like the rest of the Web, i.e. accessible gratis, you’ll see more of a drift in the direction of open licensing. At any rate, now there are two barriers to BBB OA; once we get gratis OA, we’ll be halfway there.
Proprietary software is another barrier to reproducible research, which is a problem, but it’s a separate question from OA to the results.
Michael, your point that OA is a public good is well placed. OA is certainly a collective action problem, which is precisely why identifying and quantifying incentives matters.
Of the possible benefits you mention, only one (larger audience and increased citations) is clearly associated with OA. The others could be incidental OA, but don’t have anything to do with OA. If you mean the last (“prestige”) in terms of “demonstrating social consciousness”, that’s possible, but it seems few funders attach much value to OA, and most of the ones that do already mandate OA for their funded research. (But see KEI’s “open source dividend” proposal.)
But your example about saving paper sparks my imagination. There are lots of experiments to encourage people to recycle more, use less energy, etc. What kind of incentives do they use? Two thoughts immediately come to mind:
- An experiment in political science sent voters a postcard informing that that, after the next election, their neighbors would receive a postcard listing which people in their neighborhood voted and which didn’t. Knowing that their peers were watching, there was a statistically significant increase in voting. Could we apply this model to OA — maybe by telling all researchers in a department that, after a year, we’d email everyone in the department with the percentage of that researcher’s newly-published papers which were deposited in the university’s IR?
- Bonuses are used throughout the institutional world. In fact, I remember even as a schoolchild, the Pasta for Pennies program, where the class which raises the most money for charity is rewarded with a free lunch. Could we apply a similar model here — e.g., whichever department achieves the highest self-archiving rate gets a bonus to (say) their monograph purchasing fund at the library?
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