Green Open Access in Astronomy and Mathematics: The Complementarity of Routines Among Authors and Readers

Open access (OA) to publications has become a major topic in science policy. However, electronic publication providing free access to research via the internet is more than a decade older, was invented in the 1990s and driven by parts of the scientific community. This paper focuses on two disciplines (astronomy and mathematics) in which green OA is well established. It asks how authors and readers use the central disciplinary repository and how they are thereby included in the communication system of their disciplines. Drawing on an interview study with 20 scientists from both disciplines, we analyze the main characteristics of an inclusion, possible problems that result from it and how they are being solved. The empirical results show that there is a complementarity between the routines of authors and readers that co-stabilize each other. This finding suggests that the emergence of complementary routines could be a necessary condition for the green OA model to succeed.