New Report: “Open Access Policy: Numbers, Analysis, Effectiveness”

The following report was released earlier this week and is available from arXiv or from the PASTEUR4OA web site.

Title

Open Access Policy: Numbers, Analysis, Effectiveness

Author
A. Swan
Y. Gargouri
M. Hunt
S. Harnad
Source
arXiv and PASTEUR4OA
Abstract (Posted on arXiv)

The PASTEUR4OA project analyses what makes an Open Access (OA) policy effective. The total number of institutional or funder OA policies worldwide is now 663 (March 2015), over half of them mandatory. ROARMAP, the policy registry, has been rebuilt to record more policy detail and provide more extensive search functionality. Deposit rates were measured for articles in institutions’ repositories and compared to the total number of WoS-indexed articles published from those institutions. Average deposit rate was over four times as high for institutions with a mandatory policy.
Six positive correlations were found between deposit rates and (1) Must-Deposit; (2) Cannot-Waive-Deposit; (3) Deposit-Linked-to-Research-Evaluation; (4) Cannot-Waive-Rights-Retention; (5) Must-Make-Deposit-OA (after allowable embargo) and (6) Can-Waive-OA. For deposit latency, there is a positive correlation between earlier deposit and (7) Must-Deposit-Immediately as well as with (4) Cannot-Waive-Rights-Retention and with mandate age. There are not yet enough OA policies to test whether still further policy conditions would contribute to mandate effectiveness but the present findings already suggest that it would be useful for current and future OA policies to adopt the seven positive conditions so as to accelerate and maximise the growth of OA.

Abstract (Posted on PASTEUR4OA)

PASTEUR4OA reports on the policy-effectiveness exercise undertaken by the project in view of providing evidence to assist open access policy development. Basis of this work was the rebuilding of ROARMAP, the open access policy registry, which was carried out by the project.  A new classification scheme was built, allowing to record and search the information with far more detail than before. The project also added 250 new policy entries to the ROARMAP database. It now contains approximately 663 entries, mostly institutional policies, 60% of them in Europe. The associated policy effectiveness exercise presented in the report examined deposit rates mandated and non-mandated research institutions. It provides important evidence to support that policies include at least three elements for effectiveness, namely, a mandatory deposit, a deposit that cannot be waived, and linking depositing with research evaluation.

Direct to Full Text Report (via arXiv) and Direct to Full Text Report (via PASTEUR4OA)

Filed under: News, Open Access, Reports