The institutional mandate is an important point to consider when advocating open access. Often this decision will be taken at a high level in the institution. A mandate will fundamentally change the way open access is discussed, without a mandate discussions tend to center around persuasive techniques, with a mandate discussions will be about compliance. There are pros and cons to both views, a mandate may result in more open access material being submitted to a Repository, however, researchers may resent being told to comply. Mandates are most helpful in bringing together various disparate silos on a campus primarily, the research offices, the offices of graduate studies, and the library to work together to develop a readily available and smooth workflow for making sure work is deposited as needed. Some examples of University actions within the United States, can be found at Open Access Directory University actions wiki page
In the United States, many campus open access mandates begin with an initial adoption by library professional staff and then a broadening out to the entire campus through faculty senate votes. In other cases, the adoption is incorporated into promotion and tenure guidelines but not as a mandate. In some cases, entire university system, such as the Academic Senate of the University of California adopted and Open Access Policy on 24 July 2014.
The most widely recognized way in which open access publishing is achieved on campuses is through mandates for theses and dissertations (ETDs) to be made available electronically upon completion or with a short embargo period, indeed in the UK the Arts and Humanities Funding Council has now mandated this for theses completed as part of their funding. Any guidelines or mandates regarding open access publication/open access provision should be complimentary to other policies current in use by any given organization, especially the collection development policies.
New frontiers in Open Access for Collection Development: Perspectives from Canadian Research Libraries: http://library.ifla.org/74/1/106-burpee-en.pdf
In Europe, the UK, and Canada, national mandates have been issued regarding open access provision.
- Austrian Open Access Policy for FWF-funded projects
- European Commission Research & Innovation Science in Society Policy Initiatives
- EU-funded OpenAIRE2020 project – Gold Open Access Pilot for Post-Grant FP7 Publications
- Research Councils UK Policy on Open Access
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research Open Access Policy
In the Netherlands, Sander Dekker, The State Secretary for Education, Culture and Science, wrote a Parliamentary document on Open Access to publications, outlining the Dutch position.
In the United States, mandates have generally been limited to individual academic institutions with a few states passing mandates for open access publication at publicly funded higher education institutions. Otherwise, the public access policies have had much greater success in the U.S. have been issued by federal funding agencies at the federal level and the most widely recognized ones are from the NIH and NSF. The Association of Research Libraries in the United States have a fairly comprehensive web site on public access policies. More recently the OSTP has issued a directive that any federally funded research must appear as an open access publication at the end of twelve months. In addition, many private funding organizations such as: the Ford Foundation, and the Gates Foundation have also adopted policy mandates for research funded by their organizations.
Local academic institution mandates in the U.S. are moderately successful at this point.
Institutional mandates are usually displayed prominently on an institution’s website, this is advantageous to those looking to investigate one for their own institution, for example:
- University of Glasgow
- University of Leicester
- University of Salford
- Harvard University
- University of California
- University of Huddersfield thesis policy
ROARmap has a near complete listing of institutional, thesis and funder mandates at http://roarmap.eprints.org/
1.1 Internal Library Message on Open Access
1.2 Communication of OA Opportunities to Your Academic Community
1.3 Mandates/Policies
1.4 Promotion of Your Repository
1.5 Budgeting for Open Access Publication
1.6 Integration of Open Access Process Management
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