Open access is a core aspect of the open science movement, and nowadays, most journals offer at least the choice for optional publishing open access. Nevertheless, publishing the own research as open access (OA) is partly connected with some extra effort, and the individual publishing behaviour usually depends on different factors. Thereby, academic circumstances and individual attitudes might influence the researcher’s decision for OA. This article presents an empirical study on the current situation in the field of economics. Research aim was the investigation of the influence of academic circumstances and individual attitudes on the researcher’s publishing behaviour.

The research aim was addressed by the use of the data of the open science survey 2023 of the Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (ZBW), the world’s largest library of economic literature. The participation was voluntary and without any reward. For the analysis of the researcher’s publishing behaviour only a subsample of the data was used, namely the subsample of those 184 participants who provided all answers necessary to analyse their publishing behaviour. A hierarchical multiple linear regression was calculated to analyse the publishing behaviour. The dependent variable was the portion of the researcher’s journal articles available as OA related to all of his/her journal articles (OA-rate). The tested predictors were the researcher’s academic circumstances in form of his/her academic status and subfield of research in economics, and his/her individual attitudes towards various barriers and incentives of open science.

The results of the regression analysis revealed that both, academic circumstances as well as individual attitudes, had a significant contribution to the researcher’s publishing behaviour. With regard to academic circumstances, a higher academic status and the subfield business studies predicted a lower OA-rate. The negative contribution of a higher academic status to the OA-rate could be explained by the fact that professors usually had a higher age and a longer publication history, and thus, at the beginning of their career there were probably fewer available options to publish OA. In relation to the researcher’s individual attitudes, none of the barriers had a significant influence, but three incentives significantly contributed to the OA-rate: A higher OA-rate was positively predicted by the incentive to receive more information on how to actually implement open science practices, and the incentive to increase the number of citations for the own work. The incentive to receive attention from outside the science system was a negative predictor, i.e., a higher motivation to receive attention outside the scientific system was connected with a lower OA-rate. A possible explanation could be that scientific journal articles were estimated as an inappropriate way to reach attention outside the scientific system, because they were written for other scientists and often hard to understand for laypeople.

The presented findings provide valuable insights how to encourage publishing OA in the field of economics. Further studies with a broader spectrum of disciplines and longitudinal studies would be helpful to reveal if the researcher’s individual attitudes become more or less important in the face of political decisions and further practical progress of open science.

Keywords: Open science, open access, academic publishing behaviour, academic circumstances, individual attitudes.