Prior to the workshop, a questionnaire was distributed to delegates, to identify the different barriers (and the most important of these) which prevent adherence to the mandates.
The results of the survey were summarised during the workshop and then delegates broke into groups to develop actions around the main themes of :
- Accessing funding
- Communication
- Monitoring compliance
- Messages for publishers
The actions generated from these groups form the basis of a joint action plan, which comprises three ‘mini’ action plans: one for funders, one for institutions and one for publishers.
The UKPMC Funders’ Group will take overall ownership of the further development and implementation of these plans and will work with institutions and publishers to do this, through a new ‘Institutions’ Panel’ and a reconvened ‘Publishers’ Panel’.
The Insitutions’ Panel is now being established by the Wellcome Trust. The inaugural meeting will be in April or May 2010 and it is likely that the panel will meet twice a year. Any repository managers or research/open access administrators who support researchers funded by UKPMC funding organisations who are interested in finding out more about this panel, or who would like to join, are invited to contact the Wellcome Trust, in the first instance, at openaccess@wellcome.ac.uk.
How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates
SUMMARY: Research funder open-access mandates (such as NIH's) and university open-access mandates (such as Harvard's) are complementary. There is a simple way to integrate them to make them synergistic and mutually reinforcing:
Universities' own Institutional Repositories (IRs) are the natural locus for the direct deposit of their own research output: Universities (and research institutions) are the universal research providers of all research (funded and unfunded, in all fields) and have a direct interest in archiving, monitoring, measuring, evaluating, and showcasing their own research assets — as well as in maximizing their uptake, usage and impact.
Both universities and funders should accordingly mandate deposit of all peer-reviewed final drafts (postprints), in each author's own university IR, immediately upon acceptance for publication, for institutional and funder record-keeping purposes. Access to that immediate postprint deposit in the author's university IR may be set immediately as Open Access if copyright conditions allow; otherwise access can be set as Closed Access, pending copyright negotiations or embargoes. All the rest of the conditions described by universities and funders should accordingly apply only to the timing and copyright conditions for setting open access to those deposits, not to the depositing itself, its locus or its timing.
As a result, (1) there will be a common deposit locus for all research output worldwide; (2) university mandates will reinforce and monitor compliance with funder mandates; (3) funder mandates will reinforce university mandates; (4) legal details concerning open-access provision, copyright and embargoes will be applied independently of deposit itself, on a case by case basis, according to the conditions of each mandate; (5) opt-outs will apply only to copyright negotiations, not to deposit itself, nor its timing; and (6) any central OA repositories can then harvest the postprints from the authors' IRs under the agreed conditions at the agreed time, if they wish.
See also:
Institutional OA Mandates Reinforce and Monitor Compliance With Funder OA Mandates>
On the Wellcome Trust OA Mandate and Central vs. Institutional Deposit