Open-access mandate

An open-access mandate is a policy adopted by a research institution, research funder, or government which requires 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. An open-access mandate is a policy adopted by a research institution, research funder, or government which requires 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. 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 Liege 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). 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. 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. 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. 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. '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.