Drivers and Barriers in Digital Scholarly Communication

This thesis frames a new and comprehensive picture of digital scholarly communication today. The advent and pervasiveness of the internet could profoundly impact the research workflows, paving a way for Open Science. Given the growing demand by funders, society and policy-makers, it is needed to understand if this is indeed the case. Related research has suggested that adoption of innovations is not widespread. Thus, a more solid evidence base was needed to understand the current status and investigate drivers and barriers, to enable a more targeted support for Open Science in the future. Two major Open Science innovations, Open Access and research data sharing, have been studied in detail in this thesis. A large-scale survey and personal interviews are used to gain detailed insights from a range of disciplines. In addition, a case study in the High Energy Physics (HEP) community was used to study the results in practice. The results show that a rather positive attitude towards both, Open Access and research data sharing is not reflected in the researchers’ practices. Disciplinary differences prevail and relate to the different publishing cultures and research workflows. Furthermore, it is shown that quality and prestige of research output are perceived as very important in determining a researcher’s reputation. Researchers prefer community-approved publication outlets. They hesitate to explore new innovations, such as data sharing, for which only few established workflows exist in digital scholarly communication. The overall results point to a complex framework consisting of layers of societal, technical infrastructural, funding and strategy elements which are strongly interdependent. Interviewees highlight the significance of a link between such approaches on the one hand and the current incentive system and the research assessment schemes on the other. Moreover, the results indicate that barriers can be overcome. In the case study, a strong collaboration with the community facilitated enhanced feedback loops to develop tailored and targeted services for Open Science. Researchers in the case study were successfully engaged in new innovative workflows: a crowdsourcing tool and data sharing in a digital library. The results are of wider significance for stakeholders in digital scholarly communication today: they highlight that opportunities of Open Science are not yet explored widely. But with targeted support, it is possible to build on best practices and develop strategies that engage communities in new innovations. The results furthermore demand new strategies to establish links from Open Science services to the academic incentive system. It is needed to revisit the current research assessment scheme in regard to potential support mechanisms for Open Science.