Open Access Mandates and Open Access “Mandates” | The Scholarly Kitchen

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-02-13

Summary:

"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). Funder mandates tend to be powerful by their nature: when a grant provider says 'you have to publish your results in an OA venue or you won’t get further funding from us,' authors have a real incentive to comply. The power of these mandates is, however, demonstrably less than absolute: even with such incentives, compliance is never perfect and is often far from perfect. Nevertheless, funder mandates are usually relatively powerful. Institutional mandates are a much more mixed bag. Some are powerful, many are not, and a great many of them are not even real. But it’s interesting to note that patterns of 'mandatoriness' can be discerned across countries. A spot-check of the ROARMAP database is instructive: Australian and British institutional mandates tend to be real, such as the ones at Victoria University and the University of Southampton. These generally require OA deposit without exception, though often allowing for temporary embargoes where required by publishers. Institutional mandates in the United States, however, are very rarely real, and while they may be called 'mandates' colloquially, they often turn out to be little more than statements of institutional preference. In the U.S., the pattern these non-mandatory mandates take is pretty consistent. The policy document describing them usually consists of the following elements (or some variation on them): A statement of commitment to the broader dissemination of research; A statement that all authors who publish the results of research performed as faculty members grant the institution a license to exercise essentially all copyright prerogatives in regard to the work; A requirement that all such publications be placed in the institutional repository; A clause allowing faculty members to opt out of participation upon request and usually without condition. To be clear: the opt-out language is very often absolute — faculty are sometimes required to give a reason for opting out, but I have never seen a policy that defines acceptable and unacceptable reasons. Given that compliance with these (non-)mandates is so often purely voluntary, what real-world effect do they really have? I would suggest that they have at least two significant–though perhaps not equally important–effects. First of all, they offer a relatively low-cost and very low-risk way for an institution publicly to affirm its support for the idea and the ideals of OA ... Second, an OA policy can switch the traditional default setting of scholarly publishing. The traditional default setting is for copyright to remain uniquely with the author despite the fact that the work was created as part of the author’s employment ..."

Link:

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/02/12/open-access-mandates-and-open-access-mandates/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » pontika.nancy@gmail.com's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.licensing oa.copyright oa.embargoes oa.green oa.compliance oa.colleges oa.universities oa.funders oa.australia oa.usa oa.uk oa.mandates oa.comment oa.new ru.sparc oa.repositories oa.hei oa.libre oa.policies

Date tagged:

02/13/2014, 09:40

Date published:

02/13/2014, 02:16