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") or both.
Characteristics
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).Registry of Open Access Mandatory Archiving Policies
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. Mandates are classified and ranked by some of these properties in MELIBEA.
Institutional and funder mandates
Universities can adopt open-access mandates for their faculty. All such mandates make allowances for special cases. Tenured faculty cannot be required to publish; nor can they be required to make their publications open access., which cites 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.Rentier, B., & Thirion, P. (2011). The Liège ORBi model: Mandatory policy without rights retention but linked to assessment processes. 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 consisting of a default rights-retention contract (together with a waiver option for individual special cases).
Research funders such as government funding agencies or private foundations can adopt open-access mandates as contractual conditions for receiving funding.
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.
Principal kinds of open-access mandates "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." 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. 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.
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.Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button'. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)) 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.
Locus of deposit 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 Mandates may require deposit immediately upon publication (or acceptance for publication) or after an allowable embargo.
Timing of opening access to deposit Mandates may require opening access to the deposit immediately upon publication (or acceptance for publication) or after an allowable embargo.
Instances
Canadian funding agencies The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) proposed a mandate in 2006 and adopted it in September 2007,OA Self-Archiving Policy: Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) . Eprints.org (4 January 2007). Retrieved 2011-12-03. becoming the first North American public research funder to do so. The CIHR Policy on Access to Research OutputsCIHR Policy on Access to Research Outputs – CIHR. Cihr-irsc.gc.ca. Retrieved 2011-12-03. 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.See the proposal and the description of the consultation on NSERC website.
On 27 February 2015 a Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications was announced.announcement of the new Tri-Agency Open Access Policy 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. 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.
United States funding agencies In May 2006, the US Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) was proposed toward improving the NIH Public Access Policy. 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". 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.
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".
Also in 2013, the White House issued a directive 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".
As a result, open-access repositories and multi-annual open access strategies have been developed by federal institutions like the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Energy. 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.
In 2019, the GAO issued a report on the implementation of the 2013 directive, with 37 recommendations to 16 agencies.
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, thus ending over 50 years of Serials crisis albeit only for the US contributions.
European funding agencies In April 2006, the European CommissionStudy on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets in Europe. Ec.europa.eu (23 February 2009). Retrieved 2011-12-03. 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). The project OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe) has since been launched.