Behavioral Reluctance in Adopting Open Access Publishing: Insights From a Goal-Directed Perspective

Despite growing awareness of the benefits of large-scale open access publishing, individual researchers seem reluctant to adopt this behavior, thereby slowing down the evolution towards a new scientific culture. We apply the goal-directed framework of Moors and colleagues (Moors, 2019; Moors, Boddez, & De Houwer, 2017) to shed light on this type of behavioral reluctance and to organize and suggest possible interventions. This framework explains behavior as the result of a cycle of events starting with the detection of a discrepancy between a goal and a status quo and the selection of behavior to reduce this discrepancy. We list various factors that may hinder this cycle and thus contribute to behavioral reluctance. After that, we highlight potential remedies to address each of the identified barriers. We thereby hope to point out new ways to think about behavioral reluctances in general, and in relation to open access publishing in particular. Preparation of this article was supported by Research Program G073317N of the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) and Grant C14/17/047 of the Research Fund of KU Leuven. Jan De Houwer is supported by Ghent University grant BOF16/MET_V/002. Frederick Verbruggen is supported by an ERC Consolidator grant (European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement No 769595). notReviewed other