Understanding barriers affecting the adoption and usage of open access data in the context of organizations

Data and information are growing exponentially due to advances and innovations in information and communication technologies. This growth forces organizations to gain new capabilities to compete or stay current in their marketplace. Open Access Data (OAD), resulting from the open source movement, is seen as a double-edged sword from the management perspective. It can potentially provide enormous social and economic value, such as transparency, participation culture, innovativeness, and accountability to organizations, governments, and, more importantly, citizens. Although the benefits of organizational adoption are significant, most OAD-related projects fail cause of organizational barriers and resistance to adoption. This study first aims to find these organizational barriers on adopting OAD to raise awareness of the obstacles organizations must overcome. Towards this aim, after conducting a systematic literature review (SLR) and an expert panel, a research model based on the Technology – Organization – Environment (TOE) framework is proposed in this study. As a result of SLR, 97 barriers were identified from ten primary studies. After critically examining these barriers, a research model classifying 22 crucial barriers to organizational OAD adoption based on the TOE framework is proposed. Another significant contribution of this study is to draw attention to under-researched barriers in the literature, such as Power and Control, Political Commitment, Inter-Organizational Trust, IT Governance, and Competitive Pressure.