Open Access Week Mandate Adoption Challenge Collected 16 New Mandates

Green and gold leaves float down to earth. Nature’s rich October harvest.
(Open Access Haiku)

The repetitive stress on Open Access Week 2010 as the most successful and the most fruitful open access week yet, is much desired. “October 2010 was the most prolific month for OA mandates in our history,” according to Peter Suber’s most recent newsletter. Eprints, located at prestigious University of Southampton, that also celebrated its 10th birthday during the Open Access Week, had proposed one of the challenges for the event. It was a challenge to OA mandate adoption, and it was directed to universities, research institutions and research funders all around the world. The institutions were invited to register their adopted or proposed OA mandate in ROARMAP, in order to help the research community measure its progress by keeping track of  the growth of institutional self-archiving policies.

2+6+1+1+2+4

An OA mandate is a policy that requires researchers to make their published, peer-reviewed journal and conference papers open access by depositing their final material in an OA institutional (or central) repository. That institutions have recognized how much more effective research is, when made collaborative by enabling unlimited access to research output, is obvious from the following adoptions of the mandate, as collected by Peter Suber;

Two funders mandates ensure grants for OA publications:

• Agricultural Research Service at the US Department of Agriculture http://www.ars.usda.gov/main/main.htm
• funding program at the Gates Foundation (as in Bill Gates) http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Pages/home.aspx

Six research institutions and/or awarded Universities adopted the OA policy:

• Australian National University (http://www.anu.edu.au/index.php)
• Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (http://www.international.inra.fr/)
• Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (http://www.uoc.edu/portal/english/)
• Teesside University (http://www.tees.ac.uk/)
• Trinity College Dublin (http://www.tcd.ie/)
• University of Tromsø (http://www2.uit.no/ikbViewer/page/startsida)

One multi-institutional consortium mandate adopted:

• the EUR-OCEANS Consortium, representing 29 institutions http://vds1719.sivit.org/eoc/

One departmental OA mandate:

• Library faculty at Indiana University, Purdue University Indianapolis http://www.libraries.iub.edu/

Two adopted OA resolutions or pledges to link to and/or self-archive publications to make them freely accessible:

• librarians at Arizona State University (http://lib.asu.edu/librarians)
• University of Northern Colorado (http://www.unco.edu/)

Four OA thesis mandates:

• University of Westminster (http://www.wmin.ac.uk/)
• Loughborough University (http://www.lboro.ac.uk/)
• University of Nottingham (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/)
• Wageningen University & Research Centre (http://www.wur.nl/uk/)

And more are yet forthcoming or in preparation.

The rich October harvest is charted by Dr. Alma Swan in OpenOasis:

The total count of OA Mandates registered in ROARMAP today is as follows:

• 104 institutional (+4 proposed) mandates
• 28 departmental (+4 proposed) mandates
• 46 funder (+8 proposed) mandates
• 67 thesis mandates
• 1 multi-institutional (+5 proposed) mandates

Which counts to 246 (+21 proposed) OA mandates.
The harvest is not closed with numbers and figures presented, since their continual growth is anticipated with enthusiasm.