Abstract
In this paper we examine two national university fields embarking on the transnational transition towards Open Access publishing at different times with different approaches. Our findings show different paths in each national field which unfold a different form of temporality. Without directly collaborating on the transition, the national field paths influenced each other through perturbation impulses from one field to the other which changed the overarching transnational trajectory. Based on these findings our study contributes to the scholarly understanding of the temporal complexity of transnational dynamics in nested organizational fields.