Abstract

The proposal made in September 2018 by cOAlition S to progress towards full immediate open access (OA) by signing transformative agreements with publishers was received with understandable skepticism by some relevant actors in countries with lower OA implementation and lower economic resources to address this transition. This text argues that these so-called transformative agreements are bound to be most efficient where green OA is already consolidated and explores the viability of the new Rights Retention Strategy as a corollary of such a strategy.

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.