Open Access Mandates
Status Report 2007
Peter Suber:
"The compelling case for mandating open access for publicly funded research spread even further in 2007 than in 2006. Last year, when I called 2006 the year of the mandate, I didn’t think that would be possible.
Let me start with the OA mandate at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), because it's the most recent and because it's the culmination of a three-year drama. Here's a quick synopsis of the saga, limited to 2007:
When the year began, the NIH was requesting, not requiring, open access to NIH-funded research, under a policy in effect since May 2005. In March 2007, NIH Director Elias Zerhouni told Congress (for the second time) that the agency needed an OA mandate. In July 2007 the House of Representatives adopted (for the second time) an appropriations bill demanding an OA mandate at the NIH. In October 2007 the Senate adopted the same language (for the first time). In November, President Bush vetoed the bill for reasons unrelated to the NIH provision, and the House failed to override the veto. Congress responded by combining many of the vetoed appropriations into one omnibus bill, cutting spending down to levels that the President could accept, and retaining the NIH OA provision without modification. Congress passed the bill on December 19 and Bush signed it on December 26, 2007. The NIH is the world's largest funder of non-classified scientific research and its research results in about 65,000 peer-reviewed journal articles every year.
Earlier in 2007, OA mandates were adopted by the UK Arthritis Research Campaign, the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council, the UK Department of Health, the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Executive Health Department, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, France's National Agency for Research (Agence nationale de la recherche), the Research Foundation Flanders (Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek), and the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Two of the Research Councils UK merged, one with an OA mandate (Particle Physics & Astronomy Research Council) and one without (Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils), but the new merged organization had an OA mandate (Science and Technology Facilities Council). The European Commission FP7 Grant Agreement contains an OA mandate. The Flanders Marine Institute (Vlaams Instituut voor de Zee) adopted a policy that functions like a mandate, and Armenia is developing a national OA system which looks like it will mandate green OA while providing support for green and gold OA. (For the difference between green and gold OA, see the appendix.)
Among private funders, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute adopted an OA mandate. The UK Medical Research Council and British Heart Foundation, which both already had OA mandates, joined with a group of private-sector pharmaceutical companies to fund research into biomarkers, and all parties agreed to operate the fund under an OA mandate. And this list doesn't even include the university mandates and data mandates (which I cover below).
The UK is clearly the country with the greatest number of agencies mandating OA to publicly funded research. Six of the seven Research Councils UK now have adopted mandates, and the seventh (Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council) is still deliberating. All 10 members of the UK PubMed Central Funders Group have adopted mandates. Until the NIH writes the policy Congress has asked it to write, the UK is also the country with the greatest volume of research subject to an OA mandate.
Other funders and jurisdictions are considering mandates. The Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering & Technology released a beautifully strong draft OA mandate for public comment. The European Research Council pledged to adopt an OA mandate in 2006, before the agency itself was officially established; the agency launched in February 2007 and in September reiterated its commitment to an OA mandate. A bill introduced in the Brazilian Parliament would require public universities to mandate OA to their research output, and the Ethics Committee of France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique recommended the broadest possible dissemination of research publications and data.
Some serious 2007 recommendations for OA mandates are still pending with policy-makers. In Europe, there were calls for an EU-wide OA mandate from the European Research Advisory Board, the European University Association's Working Group on Open Access, and a petition was organized by six government and non-profit organizations. The petition now has 26,900+ signatures, including 1,300+ signatures from research institutions. In the US, eight non-profit organizations launched a similar petition (temporarily offline), and other calls for OA to publicly funded research came from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Energy. The final report of a joint UK/US meeting (sponsored by JISC and the NSF) recommended an OA mandate for publicly funded research. In the UK, the e-Infrastructure Working Group of the Office of Science and Innovation endorsed the OA mandate at the Research Councils UK. Library and Archives Canada and Germany's Green Party called for open access to publicly funded research. In India, the National Knowledge Commission recommended an OA mandate first through its Working Group on Libraries, then again through its Working Group on Open Access and Open Educational Resources, and yet again in a letter from its chairman to the Indian Prime Minister. In South Africa, Eve Gray, a publishing consultant, recommended an OA mandate in a policy paper for the Open Society Institute, and then a month later reported that the South African government appeared to be moving in that direction. The Botswana Minister of Education, Jacob Nkate, and Slovenian Minister for Growth, Ziga Turk, called for OA mandates to publicly funded research.
Most of the funder OA policies adopted in 2007 were mandates, and all the adopted mandates were for green OA, but there were a few eddies in the stream where the current ran backwards. The Hong Kong Research Grants Council and the Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance decided to encourage rather than require OA for the research they fund, following the failed first version of the NIH policy. The World Health Organization (WHO) Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property (IGWG2) was considering an OA mandate until November, when it weakened its draft policy and settled for mere encouragement. It's not likely that any of these organizations could do better than the NIH at eliciting voluntary compliance from busy researchers, and more likely that publisher lobbying and agency misunderstandings blocked the adoption of stronger policies. Two of the adopted mandates in 2007 — the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research — had large loopholes allowing publishers to opt out for themselves and for all grantees who choose to publish with them. The Australian Productivity Commission proposed a gold OA mandate, not realizing that a gold OA policy would either regulate publishers rather than grantees (a needlessly strong step) or severely limit the freedom of authors to publish in the journals of their choice.
Universities on four continents showed that they didn't want to wait for OA policies from funders or governments. University-level OA mandates were adopted at the University of Liege, Central Economics and Mathematics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and at Turkey's Middle East Technical University. OA mandates are also under consideration at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the University of California. The University of Southampton Department of Electronics and Computer Science documented the success of its self-archiving mandate, showing a compliance rate between 80% and 100%, depending on how one estimates the department's overall research output. Ilmenau Technical University adopted an OA mandate for the books published by its university press. University rectors in Brazil and Europe began organizing to persuade universities in their regions to adopt strong local OA policies. The Brazilian effort is led by the University of Brasilia, and the European effort by the University of Liege. If the rectors who met in Brasilia and Liege to kickstart these campaigns all adopt mandates on their own campuses, they will double the number of universities with OA mandates, even before they persuade any other institutions. Other university organizations were active on other fronts. Universities UK supported an OA mandate in the EU, and the 12-member US Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) joined the Google Library Project, drafted an author addendum, and urged its member institutions to adopt it." (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0011.110)