In examining the motivations academics have for publishing in peer reviewed journals, Hemmings et al. (2006) suggest three categories of factors: incentive, pressure and support. Incentive was the most salient of these and could take intrinsic forms, such as sharing findings, and extrinsic forms, such as increased chances of promotion. Given that academics are very rarely paid for contributions, then the open access impact advantage benefits this motivation of incentive – whether the main appeal is to increase interest in the area or to improve an individual’s profile, then increasing the number of downloads and citations of an article will likely benefit these aims. This is only countered by the prestige of publishing in certain journals, whether they are open or not.
Open access publishing operates as an efficient, pragmatic model for disseminating research findings, which is the primary function of academic publishing. It also has a strong ethical, or ideological, argument, since much of the funding for the research that is published in journals comes from public sources. This forms a central tenet of most open access mandates; for example, the Wellcome Trust (n.d.), a charity which funds medical research, states that it ‘believes that maximising the distribution of these papers – by providing free, online access – is the most effective way of ensuring that the research we fund can be accessed, read and built upon.’
The US OSTP policy (Holdren, 2013) states that ‘the direct results of federally funded scientific research are made available to and useful for the public, industry, and the scientific community’. There is a straightforward argument here that if the public are paying for research, then they should have access to it. There is also a more general argument that research progresses by making it available to as many as people as possible, and that access to any
