Open access publishing strategies have traditionally been directed towards what has been regarded as a homogenous scientific community of universities, researchers and libraries. However, discipline specific practices in communication and publishing strategies are prevailing in different scientific areas. In this study we, argue that discipline specific publishing patterns may affect the ways that open access strategies can be adopted in different scientific areas. We characterise and identify incentives for publishing open access into factors depending mostly on the social environment and factors mostly depending on personal factors of the researcher. In the case study comparing the field of biomedicine and economics and business administration we were able to find out figures on the proportion, type and channel of open access publishing of scientific articles by Finnish researchers in economics and medicine.