This study examines stakeholder relationships in the context of rumours of a forthcoming American Open Access mandate which surfaced in December 2019. Empirical material was gathered through the social media network Twitter, and through a data collection exercise of article-length documents on the subject. In the process of theme discovery, material was explored with manual scrutiny, software to produce visualisations of semantic maps and network analyses, and qualitative data analysis. The study is informed by the theoretical framework of boundary objects. The study finds that actor groupings central to the topic were academics, information professionals and Open Access publishers in support of the mandate, and subscription publishers opposed to it. Learned societies occupied the borderlands of the debate in a conflicted role of both publisher and academic champion.

Themes uncovered through the study included nationalistic rhetoric, taxpayer value for money, financial imbalance in the publishing ecology, and representation of members by learned societies. The results are used to consider which elements of the communities might act as a boundary object between the groups of actors.