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Chapter 6: Mandates
Prof. Balaram, Director, Indian Institute of Science says that he would like every
institution to have a repository. 117 Unfortunately, merely having repositories is not
enough. Faculty and students should deposit their research publications promptly in those
repositories for them to be useful. Most repositories are not filling up largely thanks to
author inertia. Experience has shown that mere knowledge that placing one's papers enhances
visibility and increases its propensity to win more citations is not enough to persuade
authors to self archive. People know smoking is injurious to health and yet many
people smoke. That is why open access champions have been advocating for a long time
that funding agencies and institutions should mandate open access to
research they fund/ support. As Peter Suber has put succinctly, “Mandates work and
exhortations don't. This is the universal lesson from open access mandates to date,
whether at funding agencies or universities.” What if some authors do not comply with a
mandate? Do we advocate a policy of carrot and stick and reward those who deposit and
punish those who do not? No, not necessarily. A policy of carrots all the way is all that is
needed. Surely when there is a mandate a very large percentage of authors will follow the
mandate. A study by Key Perspectives 139 had shown that a vast majority of authors —
more than 85 per cent — will gladly agree to deposit their papers in an open access archive
if either their institutions or their funders mandate open access. Once they realise
the benefits of open access then they will no longer need any mandate or incentive.
At NIT Rourkela the Director followed an ingenious method. He stipulated that those
who attend conferences must deposit their papers in the Institute's repository and get a
handle number. Unless the travel reimbursement claim includes the handle number, the
reimbursement would be made. In many institutions when faculty members are considered
for promotion or tenure, they are asked to submit only the url of their best five or ten
papers from the Institute's repository and not to submit wads of paper.
A few examples of open access mandates, some from universities and others from
funding agencies, mostly from the advanced countries, are given in Appendix 6.
1. The School of Electronics and Computer Science of the University of Southampton,
UK, was the first to adopt an open access mandate for all their research output.
2. The first university-wide mandatory policy was implemented at the Queensland
University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, in 2004 by Professor Tom Cochrane,
Deputy Vice-Chancellor.
139
Swan A, and Brown S (2005) Open Access Self-archiving: An Author Study, Technical Report, Cogprints;
http://cogprints.org/4385/.
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