Discipline-specific open access publishing practices and barriers to change: an evidence-based review

Background: Many of the discussions surrounding Open Access (OA)
revolve around how it affects publishing practices across different
academic disciplines. It was a long-held view that it would be only a
matter of time before all disciplines fully and relatively
homogeneously implemented OA. Recent large-scale bibliometric
studies show, however, that the uptake of OA differs substantially
across disciplines. We aimed to answer two questions: First, how do
different disciplines adopt and shape OA publishing practices?
Second, what discipline-specific barriers to and potentials for OA can
be identified?
Methods: In a first step, we identified and synthesized relevant
bibliometric studies that assessed OA prevalence and publishing
patterns across disciplines. In a second step, and adopting a social
shaping of technology perspective, we studied evidence on the socio-
technical forces that shape OA publishing practices. We examined a
variety of data sources, including, but not limited to, publisher policies
and guidelines, OA mandates and policies and author surveys.
Results: Over the last three decades, scholarly publishing has
experienced a shift from “closed” access to OA as the proportion of
scholarly literature that is openly accessible has increased
continuously. Estimated OA levels for publication years after 2010
varied between 29.4% and 66%. The shift towards OA is uneven across
disciplines in two respects: first, the growth of OA has been uneven
across disciplines, which manifests itself in varying OA prevalence
levels. Second, disciplines use different OA publishing channels to
make research outputs OA.
Conclusions: We conclude that historically rooted publishing practices
differ in terms of their compatibility with OA, which is the reason why
OA can be assumed to be a natural continuation of publishing cultures