“Faffing about”: Open Access, technology and researcher engagement in the United Kingdom

Open Access to research (OA) is of increasing importance, and while availability of outputs in OA is now at its highest, there seems to be a problem getting researchers to engage with it. This thesis therefore investigates researcher attitudes and behaviours concerning Open Access (OA) policies, processes and technologies, and also librarians’ effectiveness when engaging researchers to participate in OA.

The study uses an interpretative qualitative methodology; using connective ethnography (Hine, 2007) to combine multiple data collection methods and research sites to understand complex work and technological environments. I collected data via interviews, online participant observation and the Visitors and Residents (Lanclos & White, 2014) model. I used a heterogeneous approach to sampling and 18 participants are represented in the study. The data were combined and analysed using thematic analysis.

My findings reveal that researchers who are not invested in Open Access as a topic in itself do not think of OA as a priority and were not interested in Green OA in particular. There is a fundamental mismatch between librarian and researcher professional attitudes towards OA and most researchers just see OA as another administrative requirement that is difficult, time-consuming and unimportant: “faff”. Open Access policy has worked well in the UK in terms of increasing Open Access to research but very badly in terms of making researchers care about it more than other priorities and the library's Open Access systems are not designed for how most researchers work. Take away the policies and the high rates of compliance would disappear.

Not only is this study one of the first to substantially engage with both researcher and librarian responses to the UK’s REF Open Access policy, it is also the first to understand where OA-related technologies fit in with the other tools and services used by academics and the first to try to understand academic attitudes and behaviours in their full context. The study brings a new methodology to LIS and scholarly communication research in Visitors and Residents and suggests developments to the model.

My main recommendation for practice is for librarians to consider changing systems, processes, workflows and language to engage with arts, humanities and social sciences academics more directly, for whom the drivers and benefits of OA and the systems around it are not as clear. The methods and insights of this study could be applied to other areas of Open Science policy and process implementation, which are less established.