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? ...
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.
I had inadvertently and lazily framed the question as one of disincentives: “What inhibitsOA?” But that assumes, naively if implicitly, that some force (momentum? altruism?) would compel scholarly communications toward OA, if only some niggling matter didn’t stand in the way. The truth is likelier to be the opposite: that some mild force might nudge the system toward OA, but generally not forcefully enough to overcome inertia.
So I’m retreating toward a broader and more useful frame: looking at incentives and disincentives, both extant and potential, to OA. What are they, and how relatively influential are they? ...
So, in the spirit of open science, is this something other people would be interested in working on? ...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/20/2009 01:22:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
