Open Access - Research Funders and Universities

Research Funders and Universities

Research funding agencies and universities want to ensure that the research they fund and support in various ways has the greatest possible research impact.

Research funders are beginning to expect open access to the research they support. Forty-two of them (including all seven UK Research Councils) have already adopted Green OA self-archiving mandates, and four more (including two in the US) have proposed to adopt mandates (see ROARMAP)

Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, which made a commitment to open access in October 2004, has not yet adopted or proposed a mandate but the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) proposed a mandate in 2006 and adopted it in September 2007, the first North American public research funder to do so.

In May 2006, the US Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) was proposed toward improving the NIH Public Access Policy. Besides points about making open access mandatory, to which the NIH complied in 2008, it argues to extend self-archiving to the full spectrum of major US-funded research. In addition, the FRPAA would no longer stipulate that the self-archiving must be central; the deposit can now be in the author's own institutional repository (IR). The new U.S. National Institutes of Health's Public Access Policy took effect in April 2008 and states that "all articles arising from NIH funds must be submitted to PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication". It stipulates self-archiving in PubMed Central rather than in the author's own institutional repository, which some consider a strength and others a weakness. In 2012, the NIH announced it would enforce its Public Access Policy by blocking the renewal of grant funds to authors who don't follow the policy.

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Policy on Access to Research Outputs provides a number of options to researchers, including publication in open access journals, or making their manuscripts available in an online repository such as PubMed Central Canada.

In April 2006, the European Commission recommended: «EC Recommendation A1 : "Research funding agencies... should stablish a European policy mandating published articles arising from EC-funded research to be available after a given time period in open access archives...». This recommendation has since been updated and strengthened by the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB).
The OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe) project has hence been started. The EC Open Access pilot covers about 20% of the budget of the Seventh Research Framework Programme.

To somewhat improve on the EC's (and FRPAA's) allowable embargo (of up to six months), EURAB has revised the mandate: all articles must be deposited immediately upon acceptance: the allowable delay applies only to the time when access to the deposit must be made open access rather than to the time when it must be deposited. This is intended to permit individual users to use an eprint request "email eprint" button found on some archives to send a semi-automatic email message to the author requesting an individual eprint during the embargo period: This is not open access, but in the view of at least some advocates it provides for some needs during any embargo, and might help hasten the demise of embargoes altogether, while facilitating the adoption of self-archiving mandates by funders and universities.

A growing number of universities are providing institutional repositories in which their researchers can deposit their published articles. Eighty-six individual universities and eighteen faculties and departments have already adapted self-archiving mandates (including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, U. College London, U. Edinburgh) and ten further individual multi-university mandates (in Europe and Brazil) have been proposed. Eprints maintains a Registry of OA Repository Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) and EnablingOpenScholarship (EPS) provides universities with OA policy-building.

In May 2005, 16 major Dutch universities cooperatively launched DAREnet, the Digital Academic Repositories, making over 47,000 research papers available to anyone with internet access. From 1 January 2007, at the completion of the DARE programme, KNAW Research Information has taken over responsibility for the DAREnet portal. On 2 June 2008, DAREnet has been incorporated into the scholarly portal NARCIS. At the end of 2009, NARCIS provided access to 185,000 open access publications from all Dutch universities, KNAW, NWO and a number of scientific institutes.