Transition to the open access model of academic publishing: a psychological perspective

The paper argues that in order to manage the transition to the open access model we need to understand better what enables, encourages and inhibits adoption of open access publishing among academic researchers and appreciate more within-discipline differences. Our study adopts recently developed psychological model of behaviour, the COM-B model (Michie et al., 2011), to examine motivations, capabilities and opportunities for providing open access to research articles among bio-scientists with a track record of open-source approaches to intellectual property and bio-scientists with a track record of proprietary approaches to intellectual property. Content analysis of 22 in-depth interviews brings new insights into the motivations, capabilities and opportunities for open access publishing and reveals a range of significant differences between the two groups. We discuss the practical implications of our findings to illustrate how psychological assessments of scientists' behaviour could inform science policy and organisational interventions targeted at changing researchers' behaviour.