Institutional Mandates

Institutional mandates have been shown to greatly increase the incidence of self-archiving.

Having an institutional mandate in place that states that authors must submit a copy of their work to the repository has resulted in a rate of deposit close to 100%, while those institutions without mandates typically reach a spontaneous rate of deposit of only 15%. Research has also found that over 80% of authors say they would “willingly” self-archive if mandated by their institution or funding body.  Although authors are willing to self-archive it seems some encouragement may be needed before they will contribute habitually.

Harnad, S. (2008). Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University’s Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking 14(1): 51 – 68 http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/17298/3/giantpaper1.pdf

Sale, A. (2006). The acquisition of open access research articles. First Monday, 11(10). http://eprints.utas.edu.au/388/

Swan, A. (2006) The culture of Open Access: researchers’ views and responses.   In: Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects,  Chandos Publishing, Oxford, UK. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12428/

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