“Support in Principle, Vague in Practice”: Exploring Systemic Barriers to Open Access Publishing Among Humanities and Social Sciences Researchers

"Open access (OA) publishing is fundamental for ensuring equitable access to research outputs (Evans, 2012). However, research has shown that OA uptake in the humanities and social sciences disciplines (HSS) has remained low (Piwowar et.al., 2018). Besides the known barriers to OA publishing such as article processing charges (e.g., Momeni et al., 2022), the low adoption of OA in most HSS disciplines has been linked to research evaluation metrics (Laakso & Bjork, 2022). This is because most tenure and promotion requirements favour publishing in recognized top-tier journals, which are usually behind paywalls. As Larivière et al. (2015) submitted, “young researchers need to publish in prestigious journals to gain tenure, while older researchers need to do the same in order to keep their grants” (p. 13). This explains why many researchers are stuck with publishing in non-OA journals, despite being supportive of the potentials and ideals of OA...."