LibGuides: Scholarly Publishing and Open Access: Initiatives

Grant Funders

National Institutes of Health (NIH)
NIH requires those receiving NIH funds to deposit their final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts in the PubMed Central digital archive upon acceptance for publication. The Policy further requires that these papers be made accessible to the public in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication. Many publishers facilitate compliance.

A growing number of funding agencies and organizations are requiring that grant recipients make the results of their work open for public access. Here is a brief, non-exhaustive list of funders with these mandates. A more complete list can be found on the Sherpa Juliet site.

Autism Speaks
Since December 3, 2008, all grant recipients are required to deposit an electronic copy of their final peer-reviewed manuscripts in PubMed Central immediately upon acceptance for journal publication. The manuscript is to be made publicly available in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after the official date of journal publication.
MacArthur Foundation
Publications resulting from projects funded in part or full are to be deposited in appropriate repositories. Costs of open access publishing should be included in funding requests. Authors are encouraged to use Creative Commons licenses. Delayed or limited dissemination requests will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
For "major" authors of original research articles, who are HHMI laboratory heads, investigators and/or group leaders, deposition in an open access repository is required. While not required for all HHMI grantees, their compliance is encouraged. To facilitate deposition, the HHMI has developed an interface to PubMed Central. Other repositories are also acceptable, as appropriate. Articles must be made freely available within six months of publication.
Wellcome Trust (UK)
The Wellcome Trust requires that funded research work accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal be made available through PubMed Central (PMC) and UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) within six months of the journal publisher's official date of final publication. The Trust will cover author fees, where required by the journal for compliance.

Academic Institutions

Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI)
- Kansas and 21 other universities and colleges announced that they’re joining forces to form the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions, or Coapi.
- The new group will “collaborate and share implementation strategies, and advocate on a national level.
- The group’s members so far include Arizona State, Columbia, Duke, Emory, Harvard, Oregon State, Stanford,Trinity universities, MIT, and Oberlin College.

Many academic institutions around the world adopted Open Access Self-Archiving Policies that require faculty and researchers to deposit their final, peer-reviewed drafts in an Open Access institutional or central repository.

- Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) indexes OA mandates from around the world and generates lists of mandate holders by country or the type of mandate.

- The Directory of Open Access Repositories - OpenDOAR - is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories throughout the world. More than 2000 institutions participate.

- Open Access Policies for Universities and Research Institutions (EOS) and Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS) are useful resources for institutions to understand and formulate OA policies.

Selected OA facts and initiatives:

Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity
Supports equity of the business models by committing each university to "the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds".
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- OA policy was adopted by unanimous vote of the faculty in 2009; by MIT Press in 2011
- Collections in DSpace are accessed from nearly every country in the world at an average rate of over 30,000 downloads a day. In 2010 there were 11.2 million total downloads.
Harvard University
The following schools at Harvard adopted sub-institutional policies:
- Harvard Business School
- Harvard Divinity School
- Harvard Law School
- Harvard University Graduate School of Design
- Harvard University Graduate School of Education
- Harvard University: Faculty of Arts and Sciences
- Harvard University: John F. Kennedy School of Government
Brandeis University
Thesis mandate: Students completing graduate programs with a master's thesis requirement must electronically deposit their thesis to the Brandeis Institutional Repository.
Boston College students submit their theses and dissertations electronically, also. They are given the option to make their work open access, and approximately 90% choose to do so.

Hybrid Open Access Journals

SHERPA/RoMEO Publishers with Paid Options for Open Access
An extensive list of hybrid open access options, with fees and other details.

Hybrid open access, or open access by article, is a model where an author has the choice of paying upfront to make the article freely accessible. Other articles in the journal are only available by subscription. This provides a way for traditional journals to let authors meet funding and institutional mandate needs. It is a way for those who need to publish in traditional journals to provide access to their scholarly work for all.

While these traditional publishers do allow access to all for these articles, they may not meet the other criteria for true open access as defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative.