Barriers to open access publishing: Views from the library literature

Abstract

The library and information science (LIS) community has an active role in supporting access to information and, therefore, is an important stakeholder in the open access conversation. One major discussion involves the barriers that have hindered the complete transition to open access in scientific publications. Building upon a longitudinal study by Bo-Christer Björk that looked at barriers to the open access publishing of scholarly articles, this study evaluates the discussion of those barriers in the LIS literature over the ten year period 2004–2014, and compares this to Björk’s conclusions about gold open access publishing. Content analysis and bibliometrics are used to confirm the growth of the discussion of open access in the past ten years and gain insight into the most prevalent issues hindering the development of open access.