Factors influencing Canadian HASS researchers’ open access publishing practices

Implication for the future of scholarly communication

Abstract

Despite increasing awareness and support for open access (OA) publishing, and the advantages of doing so, there is still a low uptake of OA in some disciplines. We surveyed 228 early and mid-career researchers from 15 public universities in Canada. The Social Exchange Theory provided a theoretical foundation that informed factors investigated in this study. Correlation and regression analyses were used to test research hypotheses, while one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was employed to test level of effect sizes within subjects. Findings show that altruism (r =.352, β = .331) influenced researchers’ OA publishing practices whereas visibility and prestige do not, even though they are positively correlated. Furthermore, ANOVA results showed that researchers’ career stages have significant effect on their OA publishing practices as mid-career researchers published more in OA outlets. Therefore, building structures and policies that spur researchers’ altruism towards publishing OA should be a continuous and future approach to achieving the ideals of OA in Canada.