New CIHR Open Access Mandate Still Needs a Tweak

The updated Canada Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Open Access Mandate has taken one step forward and one step back. The archiving must always be done by the author, not the publisher (and preferably in the author's institutional repository, never the publisher's website, so the institution can verify timely compliance); and the deposit must be done immediately upon publication in every instance. (The length of the allowable embargo is less important than the necessity of immediate institutional deposit by the author. PMC Canada and others can then harvest automatically from the author's institutional repositories.) RECOMMENDED TWEAK TO OPTIMIZE CIHR OA MANDATE: Grant recipients are required to archive the final peer-reviewed full-text manuscripts of their publications in their institutional repository immediately upon publication and must ensure that they are freely accessible within [X] months of publication.