Abstract

Historical overview of the significant contributions the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton has made to promote open access (OA), leading this movement worldwide. The advantages and disadvantages of the so-called greenway (self-archiving in repositories) and golden road (author pays) are presented. An analysis is made of the historical mistake of promoting the golden road to open access, instead of the green road. The different policies to achieve universal OA to science are discussed.

Abstract

Universities and research centers in Spain are subject to a national open access (OA) mandate and to their own OA institutional policies, if any, but compliance with these requirements has not been fully monitored yet. We studied the degree of OA archiving of publications of 28 universities within the period 2012-2014. Of these, 12 have an institutional OA mandate, 9 do not require but request or encourage OA of scholarly outputs, and 7 do not have a formal OA statement but are well known for their support of the OA movement. The potential OA rate was calculated according to the publisher open access policies indicated in Sherpa/Romeo directory. The universities showed an asymmetric distribution of 1% to 63% of articles archived in repositories that matched those indexed by the Web of Science in the same period, of which 1% to 35% were OA and the rest were closed access. For articles on work carried out with public funding and subject to the Spanish Science law, the percentage was similar or slightly higher. However, the analysis of potential OA showed that the figure could have reached 80% in some cases. This means that the real proportion of articles in OA is far below what it could potentially be.

Abstract

With the support of governments, research funding agencies or academic institutions, Open Access is taking hold in the field of scholarly communication. More and more cases are found where recommendations on Open Access publication are transformed into obligations that researchers must comply with. Plan S, the Spanish Law on Science, Technology and Innovation or several university mandates are some examples of this change in trend. Given this situation, it is necessary to check compliance with these mandates from at least two points of view, on the one hand, to ensure that publications are in Open Access and on the other hand, that they comply with the established deadlines. So far, several attempts have been made to monitor compliance with the mandates from different perspectives, however, few have considered the time frame in which a publication must be in Open Access. To improve this monitoring, we propose the use of existing information in the repositories, such as, information on the funders, date of publication of the work in the academic journal and date of deposit in the repository, as well as the presentation of this information through the OAI-PMH (Open Archive Initiative – Procotol for Metadata Harvesting). In this way, monitoring could be improved at the institutional level. In addition, this information could also be collected by harvesters such as Recolecta, so that they can become a tool for monitoring Open Access publication mandates at the national level.