Signaling in the Academic Job Market – The Case of Open Access Publishing Agreements

Open access publishing has become more and more popular in the last two decades. Only recently, open access deals, also called offsetting agreements, transformative agreements, or open access publishing agreements arose as incubators of open access publishing by waiving individual authors’ article processing charges. We ask the research question whether such open access publishing agreements managed to increase the share of open access publications in business research. We generate our theoretical model by drawing from signaling theory. To test this model, we conduct a bibliometric study among research articles, reviews and conference papers published in FT-50 journals between 2010 and 2019. We find that none of the FT-50 journals constitutes a gold open access journal (i.e. providing free access to all articles). Furthermore, our results show that the share of open access publishing among FT-50 journals is substantially lower than those from other disciplines. While junior scholars do not differ in their open access publishing behavior, the number of affiliated institutions and the number of affiliated countries have positive effects on open access publishing. We therefore call upon business research publishers and societies to establish gold open access journals, universities to educate junior scholars on open access publishing opportunities and national and supra-national agencies to negotiate open access publishing agreements on behalf of their dedicated research institutions.