Basic issues involved in wording an institutional Open Access policy

For an incisive exploration of the principles involved in developing an institutional Open Access policy see Peter Suber's Three Principles for University Open Access Policies.

The basic issues with respect to wording an Open Access policy are:

Evidence suggests that the earlier an article becomes available to others the greater its eventual impact. Authors should therefore be required to deposit their articles in the institutional repository immediately they have been accepted for publication in a journal, after the peer review process and once the final corrections and modifications have been made. This is also the natural point in the article’s life cycle for deposit to happen – when the author is effectively ‘putting it to bed’.

Publishers, even if they permit self-archiving by authors of the author’s final version of an article, may still wish to impose an embargo period during which Open Access is not permitted. This period varies: it may be as short as 3 months for some science journals and as long as 24 months in the humanities and social sciences.

It is accepted practice that in most cases authors are required to relinquish copyright to journal publishers in return for having an article published. This may seem a rather one-sided bargain, since the author is also required to give the publisher the article for free (and of course the author’s institution is required to pay to have that article in a journal on the library shelves). However, that is the norm. But now many authors, increasingly often encouraged by their universities, are now insisting on keeping their copyright and not signing it over to publishers. The recent mandate from Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences requires authors to retain their own copyright, for example.

In these circumstances the author usually assigns the publisher a ‘licence to publish’. This is normally done through adding an ‘author addendum’ to a conventional publisher copyright transfer agreement (CTA), the document the publisher wishes the author to sign and which transfers copyright to the publisher. Specimen author licences have been drawn up by various organisations. The two most commonly used ones are those from SPARC/Science Commons and from SURF/JISC (the national ICT organisations in the Netherlands and the UK).

It is worth noting that although increasing numbers of authors feel strongly that they wish to retain copyright in their own work, there are also many who do not relish the procedure of organising this with their publisher. Open Access can be achieved satisfactorily without this negotiation if authors are reluctant to engage in it (see types of policy wording).

Authors generally have strong opinions on the best journals in which to publish their work. Open Access policies should always ideally leave that choice with them, though some (big) funder mandates have closed the door on journals where the publisher does not permit the conditions that the funder requires. The biggest of these is the US National Institutes of Health which, along with the Wellcome Trust, mandates Open Access for all research it funds. If journals do not permit Open Access within 6 months of publication then the author is required to publish in a different journal that does. The result of this tough policy is that journals are changing their terms to comply with the funder mandates: very few journals wish to deny themselves the chance to publish articles from work funded by these prestigious funders.

Types of policy wording

Author addenda