This PhD thesis follows up on previous studies aiming at finding out what a representative sample of researchers from all over the world and from all disciplines think about OA. We replicated the largest study of this type to date: the Study of Open Access Publishing run in 2010 (SOAP 2010). We present a descriptive longitudinal study of active researcher’s opinions on open access publishing. We re-analysed a dataset from SOAP 2010 and we contacted authors publishing in scientific journals indexed in international databases (WoS 2016). We analysed the scientific community’s opinions on open access, in particular its evolution in the past 7 years. To do so, we used two different samples: The SOAP project study (Dallmeier-Tiessen et al., 2011) An ad-hoc sample obtained from the Web of Science database (WoS 2016) consisting of 15,235 unique responses This PhD thesis was successfully defended on 24 July 2017 at the Facultad de Comunicacion y Documentacion from the University of Granada (Spain). Please note that although the first few pages of this document are in Spanish all the rest is written in English.