Kudos to Oxford for "Act On Acceptance" System for HEFCE/REF2020

Kudos to the University of Oxford! Although the Oxford 2013 "Statement on Open Access" had been rather weak and vague, it has now been reinforced by Open Access Oxford's 2015 system for implementing HEFCE/REF2020, and this time it's the optimal system.

Now all that's needed in order to monitor and ensure compliance is to make the date-of-acceptance (year, month, day) field in the Oxford repository (ORA) a mandatory field (and advise authors to make sure to retain their acceptance letter for possible audit).

The repository software can then calculate the (likewise mandatory) deposit date D and the Acceptance date A and subtract D - A. If D - A < 3 (months) then the article is HEFCE-compliant and eligible for REF2020.

If D - A > 3 then the author is alerted that the article risks not being eligible for REF2020 and that for future articles D - A must be less than 3 months.

Automated D-A monitoring and feedback to authors should be continuous and immediate.

HEFCE/REF2020 will probably be flexible about the start-up 1-2 years, but not longer than that. Oxford is right to get the system in place as early as possible. 

Vincent-Lamarre, Philippe, Boivin, Jade, Gargouri, Yassine, Larivière, Vincent and Harnad, Stevan (2015) Estimating Open Access Mandate Effectiveness: I. The MELIBEA Score. Journal of the  Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) (2015, in press) / Swan, Alma; Gargouri, Yassine; Hunt, Megan; & Harnad, Stevan (2015) Open Access Policy: Numbers, Analysis, Effectiveness. Pasteur4OA Workpackage 3 Report.