2023/14 | LEM Working Paper Series | ||||||||||||||||
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The Effect of Lobbies' Narratives on Academics' Perceptions of Scientific Publishing: An Information Provision Experiment |
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Giulia Rossello and Arianna Martinelli |
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Keywords | |||||||||||||||||
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Scientific Publishers, Academics' Perception, Information Provision Experiment, Copyright and Knowledge Diffusion.
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JEL Classifications | |||||||||||||||||
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D83, I23, O34
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Abstract | |||||||||||||||||
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This paper presents experimental evidence on the impact of opposite copyright
lobbies' narratives on scholars' views toward the publishing system. We conduct the empirical
analysis by running a large-scale information provision experiment on a representative
population of European scholars. Scholars were individually randomized into a control
group or one of two promotional videos presenting opposite lobbying interests. The first
video presents the publisher's narrative, featuring publishers as innovative firms and the
guardians of ethics and scientific advance. While the second presents copyright activists'
narrative featuring publishers as greedy and unethical. We document scholars' general
discontent towards the publishing system. However, both lobbyist narratives change perceptions
towards their cause. Overall, publishers' lobbyist information has a slightly smaller
persuasive effect, linked to a small part of the population that exhibits a strong emotional
reaction. Additional information is accompanied by a slight increase in the probability of
taking the action of being informed, especially when we control for the scholar's quality.
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