Evolutionary Multi-Sector Analysis of Open-Access Adoption in Scientific Communication

10/13/2023

Open-Access (OA) publishing has seen a considerable rise in adoption and public support as an alternative to traditional Closed-Access (CA). Despite its benefits for researchers, OA faces challenges regarding publisher adoption, as there is no clear revenue compensation. Additionally, various proposed government laws seek to enforce OA for publicly financed research. We present a model to investigate the adoption of OA, and its limiting factors, by taking into consideration the three main actors in the scientific communication system: funders, publishers and researchers. With it, we extract the impact of key factors, such as funding, revenue, publishing fees, taxes, and other relevant parameters on the resulting adoption dynamics. We also assess the impact of the most common alternative publishing methods: hybrid and Green OA publishing. Furthermore, we discuss policies to incentivize the adoption of OA. Our framework resorts to evolutionary game theory (EGT) applied to multiple populations to capture the multi-sector interactions between the different main actors, where the success of an individual is directly influenced by the other sectors.

Authors in the community:

• 

  A

  Alexandre Miguel da Silva Pires

  ist192414

Supervisors of this institution:

• 

  F

  Francisco Correia dos Santos

  ist25308

electrical-engineering-electronic-engineering-information-engineering - Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering

eng - English

Instituto Superior Técnico