Determinants of researchers’ copyright licensing behavior in open access

While assigning appropriate licenses at the time of publication is essential for genuine open access, research on researchers’ Creative Commons license selection behavior remains scarce. Therefore, this study investigated the extrinsic factors influencing researchers’ selection of Creative Commons licenses in hybrid journals using a bibliometric approach. A multinomial logistic regression analysis was conducted on 122,085 open-access articles published in Q1 journals in 2024 to examine the impact of funding agency mandate levels, international collaboration, subject categories, and journal impact factor percentiles. The results confirmed that stronger funding agency policies and the presence of international collaboration led to the adoption of more open licenses. Conversely, researchers selected more restrictive licenses for journals with higher prestige, and influenced by academic norms, the medical field exhibited a tendency to choose more restrictive options compared to the humanities. The findings that institutional pressure and journal prestige act as determinants of the openness of scholarly journals are expected to be utilized in formulating future open access policies.