Open-access mandate

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"Open-access policy" redirects here. Not to be confused with Open educational
resources policy.
An open-access mandate is a policy adopted by a research institution, research
funder, or government which requires or recommends researchers—usually university
faculty or research staff and/or research grant recipients—to make their
published, peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers open access (1)
by self-archiving their final, peer-reviewed drafts in a freely accessible institutional
repository or disciplinary repository ("Green OA") or (2) by publishing them in an open-
access journal ("Gold OA")[1][2][3][4] or both.

Contents

 1Characteristics
o 1.1Institutional and funder mandates
o 1.2Principal kinds of open-access mandates
o 1.3Locus of deposit
o 1.4Timing of deposit
o 1.5Timing of opening access to deposit
 2Instances
o 2.1Canadian funding agencies
o 2.2United States funding agencies
o 2.3European funding agencies
 3Effectiveness
o 3.1Tracking mandates
 4Policies adopted by research universities
o 4.1United States
 4.1.1California Institute of Technology
 4.1.2Duke University
 4.1.3Harvard University
 4.1.4Massachusetts Institute of Technology
 4.1.5Princeton University
 4.1.6Stanford University
 4.1.7University of California
 4.1.8University of Colorado Boulder
 4.1.9University of Kansas
 5See also
 6References
 7Sources
 8External links
Characteristics[edit]
Among the universities that have adopted open-access mandates for faculty
are Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University College
London, Queensland University of Technology, University of
Minho (Portugal), University of Liège and ETH Zürich. Among the funding organizations
that have adopted open-access mandates for grant recipients are National Institutes of
Health (with the NIH Public Access Policy), Research Councils UK, National Fund for
Scientific Research, Wellcome Trust and European Research Council. For a full index
of institutional and funder open-access mandates adopted to date, see the Registry of
Open Access Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP).[5]
Open-access mandates can be classified in many ways: by the type of mandating
organization (employing institution or research funder), by the locus (institutional or
institution-external) and timing of deposit itself (immediate, delayed), by the time
(immediate, delayed) at which the deposit is made open access, and by whether or not
there is a default copyright-retention contract (and whether it can be waived). Mandate
types can also be compared for strength and effectiveness (in terms of the annual
volume, proportion and timing of deposits, relative to total annual article output, as well
as the time that access to the deposit is set as open access. [6] Mandates are classified
and ranked by some of these properties in MELIBEA. [7]
Institutional and funder mandates[edit]
Universities can adopt open-access mandates for their faculty. All such mandates make
allowances for special cases.[8] Tenured faculty cannot be required to publish; nor can
they be required to make their publications open access. [9] However, mandates can take
the form of administrative procedures, such as designating repository deposit as the
official means of submitting publications for institutional research performance review,
or for research grant applications or renewal.[10] Many European university mandates
have taken the form of administrative requirements, whereas many U.S. university
mandates have taken the form of a unanimous or near-unanimous self-imposed faculty
consensus[11] consisting of a default rights-retention contract (together with a waiver
option for individual special cases).[12]
Research funders such as government funding agencies or private foundations can
adopt open-access mandates as contractual conditions for receiving funding. [8]
New open-access mandates are often announced during the annual Open Access
Week, that takes place globally during the last full week of October. For example,
the Royal Society chose Open Access Week 2011 to announce the release of the
digitized backfiles of their archives, dating from 1665 to 1941. [13]
Principal kinds of open-access mandates[edit]
"Mandate" can mean either "authorize" or "oblige". Both senses are important in
inducing researchers to provide OA. Open-access advocate Peter Suber has remarked
that "'mandate' is not a good word..." for open-access policies, "...but neither is any
other English word."[8] Other ways to describe a mandate include "shifting the default
publishing practice to open access" in the case of university faculty or "putting an open-
access condition" on grant recipients.[14] Mandates are stronger than policies which
either request or encourage open access, because they require that authors provide
open access. Some mandates allow the author to opt out if they give reasons for doing
so.[14]

 Encouragement policies - These are not requirements but merely recommendations

to provide open access.
 Loophole mandates - These require authors to provide open access if and when
their publishers allow it.
Mandates may include the following clauses:

 Mandates with a limited-embargo clause - These require authors to provide open

access either immediately or, at the latest, after a maximal permissible embargo
period (which may vary from 6 months to 12 months or more).
 Mandates with an immediate-deposit clause - These require authors to deposit their
refereed final drafts in their institutional repository immediately upon publication (or
upon acceptance for publication) whether or not their publishing contracts allow
making the deposit open access immediately: If the publisher embargoes open
access, access to the deposit can be left as closed access during any permissible
embargo period. (For closed-access deposits repositories have a request-a-copy
Button with which users can request and authors can provide a single copy with one
click each during the embargo.[15])
 Mandates with a rights-retention clause - These policies typically extend to the
parent institution a non-exclusive license to exercise any and all copyrights in the
article. Copyright remains with the author until they transfer copyright to a publisher,
at which point the non-exclusive license survives. In so doing, authors are free to
publish wherever they prefer, while granting the institution the right to post a version
of the article on the open web via an institutional repository. The benefit of the
rights-retention clause is that neither the author, nor the institution, need negotiate
open access with the publisher; the policy itself allows open access to the article.
Upon acceptance or publication, the author or their representative deposits the
article into their institutional repository. Waivers are generally available in cases
where authors do not desire open access for a given article. Examples include
Europe's Plan S and policies of Harvard University and the Wellcome Trust.[16][17]
Locus of deposit[edit]
Most institutional open-access mandates require that authors self archive their papers in
their own institutional repository. Some funder mandates specify institutional deposit,
some specify institution-external deposit, and some allow either.
Timing of deposit[edit]
Mandates may require deposit immediately upon publication (or acceptance for
publication) or after an allowable embargo.
Timing of opening access to deposit[edit]
Mandates may require opening access to the deposit immediately upon publication (or
acceptance for publication) or after an allowable embargo.

Instances[edit]
Canadian funding agencies[edit]
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) proposed a mandate in 2006 and
adopted it in September 2007,[18] becoming the first North American public research
funder to do so. The CIHR Policy on Access to Research Outputs [19] provides two
options to researchers: publication in open access journals, and making their
manuscripts available in an online central (PubMed Central Canada is recommended)
or institutional repository.
In October 2013, the two other Canadian federal funding agencies, the National Science
and Engineering Council (NSERC) and the Social Science and Humanities Research
Council (SSHRC) jointly proposed the same mandate as CIHR's, and launched a two-
month consultation on what will become the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy. [20]
On 27 February 2015 a Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications was
announced.[21][22] Peer-reviewed journal publications arising from Agency-supported
research must be made freely available within 12 months of publication, whether by
depositing in an online repository or by publishing in a journal that offers immediate or
delayed open access. The policy is effective for grants awarded from 1 May 2015
onward.
On 1 May 2015 the International Development Research Centre adopted a new open
access policy.[23] Books and journal articles must be made freely available within 12
months of publication, whether by publishing open access and using open access
journals, or by uploading to an open access repository. The policy is effective for
proposals received on or after 20 July 2015.[24]
United States funding agencies[edit]
In May 2006, the US Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) [25] was proposed
toward improving the NIH Public Access Policy.[26] Besides points about making open
access mandatory, to which the NIH complied in 2008, it argues to extend self-archiving
to the full spectrum of major US-funded research. In addition, the FRPAA would no
longer stipulate that the self-archiving must be central; the deposit can now be in the
author's own institutional repository (IR). The new U.S. National Institutes of Health's
Public Access Policy took effect in April 2008 and states that "all articles arising from
NIH funds must be submitted to PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication". [26] It
stipulates self-archiving in PubMed Central regardless of the use of the author's
own institutional repository. In 2012, the NIH announced it would enforce its Public
Access Policy by blocking the renewal of grant funds to authors who don't follow the
policy.[27]
In February 2013, the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research bill was
introduced into both houses of Congress. It was described as a "strengthened version of
FRPAA".[28]
Also in 2013, the White House issued a directive [29] requiring federal agencies "with over
$100 million in annual conduct of research and development expenditures" to develop,
within the next 6 months, a plan to make the peer-reviewed publications directly arising
from Federal funding "publicly accessible to search, retrieve, and analyze". [30]
As a result, open-access repositories and multi-annual open access strategies have
been developed by federal institutions like the Department of Agriculture[31] and
the Department of Energy.[32] DOE also hosts OSTI.gov, a repository with over 3 million
records for federal works of which over 700,000 have full text as of 2019. [33]
In 2019, the GAO issued a report on the implementation of the 2013 directive, with 37
recommendations to 16 agencies.[34]
On August 25, 2022 US Office of Science and Technology Policy under Biden's
administration issued guidance to make all federally funded research in the USA (the
first country to do so) freely available without delay, [35] [36] thus ending over 50 years
of Serials crisis albeit only for the US contributions.
European funding agencies[edit]
In April 2006, the European Commission[37] recommended: "EC Recommendation A1:
"Research funding agencies... should [e]stablish a European policy mandating
published articles arising from EC-funded research to be available after a given time
period in open access archives..." This recommendation has since been updated and
strengthened by the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB). [38] The
project OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe) has since been
launched.
The global shift towards open access to the results of publicly funded research
(publications and data) has been a core strategy in the European Commission to
improve knowledge circulation and thus innovation. It is illustrated in particular by the
general principle for open access to scientific publications in Horizon 2020 and the pilot
for research data.[39] In 2012, via a Recommendation, the European Commission
encouraged all EU Member States to put publicly funded research results in the public
sphere in order to strengthen science and the knowledge-based economy. [40] In 2017 it
emerged that the European Commission are looking to create its own open access
publishing platform for papers that emerge from the Horizon 2020 programme. [41][42][43] The
platform is likely to be similar to the one used by Wellcome Trust for Wellcome Open
Research[44] and Gates Foundation's Gates Open Research.[45]
To somewhat improve on the European Commission's (and FRPAA's) allowable
embargo of up to six months, EURAB has revised the mandate: all articles must be
deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication; the allowable delay for
complying with publisher embargoes applies only to the time when access to the
deposit must be made open access rather than to the time when it must be deposited.
Immediate deposit is required so that individual users can then request an immediate
individual copy of any deposited eprint during the embargo period by clicking on a
"RequestCopy" Button provided by the Institutional Repository software (e.g., DSPACE,
[46]
 EPrints[47]). The Button automatically sends an email message to the author requesting
an individual eprint; the author can comply with one click and the software immediately
emails the eprint to the requestor.[48] This is not open access, but may cover some
immediate research needs during any embargo. A related idea was later put forth as
the Open Access Button for papers that have not been deposited in an Institutional
Repository.

Effectiveness[edit]

Mandates triple self-archiving rates

For the four institutions with the oldest self-archiving mandates, the averaged
percentage of green open-access self-archiving has been compared to the percentage
for control articles from other institutions published in the same journals (for years
2002–2009, measured in 2011). Open-access mandates triple the percent Green OA
(see figure below).[49][50] Respective totals are derived from the Thomson Reuters Web of
Science.
Tracking mandates[edit]
As of May 2015, open-access mandates have been adopted by over 550 universities
and research institutions, and over 140 research funders worldwide. [51] Examples of
universities which have open-access mandates are Harvard University[52] and MIT[53] in
the United States, University College London[54] in the UK and ETH Zürich[55] in Europe.
Funders which require open access when their funding recipients publish include
the NIH in the US and RCUK and ERC[56] in the EU. Mandate policy models and
guidance have been provided by the Open Society Institute's EPrints Handbook,[57] EOS,
[58]
 OASIS[59] and Open Access Archivangelism.[60]
ROARMAP, the searchable Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies
at the University of Southampton indexes the world's institutional, funder and
governmental OA mandates (and the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook
(OASIS)[59] as well as EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS)[58] graph the quarterly
outcome). SHERPA/JULIET is a SHERPA service which lists funder mandates only. [61]
In international cross-disciplinary surveys conducted by Swan (2005), [62] the vast majority
of researchers respond that they would self archive willingly if their institutions or
funders mandated it. Outcome studies by Sale (2006) [63] have confirmed these survey
results. Both mandated and unmandated institutional and disciplinary repositories
worldwide are indexed by SHERPA's OpenDOAR[64] and their rate of growth is monitored
and displayed by the University of Southampton's Registry of Open Access
Repositories (ROAR).[65]
Recent studies have tested which mandate conditions are most effective in generating
deposit. The three most important conditions identified were: (1) immediate deposit
required, (2) deposit required for performance evaluation, and (3) unconditional opt-out
allowed for the OA requirement but no opt-out allowed for the deposit requirement. [66][67]

Policies adopted by research universities[edit]

The information which follows relates more closely to open access policies/mandates
covering open publishing of research outputs than to OER specifically. An open-access
policy enacted by the Faculty of a research university can empower them in choosing
how to distribute their own scholarly work. If a faculty member wishes to grant exclusive
rights to a publisher, they would first need to request a waiver from their faculty
governance body. Some reasons to implement this kind of policy institution-wide are to:

1. increase the overall impact of an institution's research contributions to the global

knowledge economy,
2. individual faculty receive their institution's full support in a unified action to work
with publishers to simplify procedures and broaden access to their scholarly
work (allowing for greater possibilities for citations of their work - important for
hiring, tenure and promotion decisions),
3. take advantage of scholarly interactions with a greater diversity of readers, not
just those who c