Open Access Mandates and Open Access "Mandates" - The Scholarly Kitchen

Open Access (OA) mandates generally come from one of two directions: some are imposed by funders and others are imposed by authors’ institutions. But put all mandates together, and it seems to me that they can be subdivided into three categories: those that are not real (meaning that they do not actually require anything of the author and therefore can’t reasonably be called “mandates”), those that are real (meaning that their prescriptions are at least theoretically mandatory) and those that are to some degree powerful (meaning not only that their prescriptions are mandatory in theory, but that they also provide mechanisms designed to compel compliance).