A Review of Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate Policies

Abstract

This article reviews the history of open access (OA) policies and examines the current status of mandate policy implementations. It finds that hundreds of policies have been proposed and adopted at various organizational levels and many of them have shown a positive effect on the rate of repository content accumulation. However, it also detects policies showing little or no visible impact on repository development, and attempts to analyze the effects of different types of policies, with varied levels of success. It concludes that an open access mandate policy, by itself, will not change existing practices of scholarly self-archiving.

It Takes More than a Mandate: Factors that Contribute to Increased Rates of Article Deposit to an Institutional Repository

“…The authors collected variables such as total number of deposits and deposit rate for each of 155 institutions that adopted an OA policy and reveal that policy strength has a positive correlation with the number of deposits and the rate of deposits (the number of articles deposited/total number of articles published). Conversely, Xia et al (2012) suggest that passing a policy does not, on its own, change faculty attitudes regarding OA or deposit practices. Furthermore, the authors emphasize that an OA policy needs to reward faculty who deposit their articles in an OA repository as part of the tenure process.…”

The UK Scholarly Communication Licence: Attempting to Cut through the Gordian Knot of the Complexities of Funder Mandates, Publisher Embargoes and Researcher Caution in Achieving Open Access

“…Jubb et al, have recently produced a report highlighting the rapid rise of green and gold OA uptake in the UK-rises which can be reasonably attributed, at least in part, to strong OA policy mandates [8]. However, others argue that these mandates alone cannot transform the scholarly publishing environment [33,34], emphasising that major barriers remain in author behaviours and academic cultures.…”

Aligning European OA policies with the Horizon 2020 OA policy

“…Other studies examine OA policies in relation to their impact on the amount of content deposited in repositories 6 or published in OA journals 7 . There are also studies that seek to inform good practice in policymaking 8 , to provide guidelines on how to develop OA policies 9 or to examine the effectiveness of OA policies whilst making recommendations on criteria that OA policies must include and on which they should align…”