Open Access Policy: Numbers, Analysis, Effectiveness

Abstract: 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.