Open access: what, where, when, how and why

The following are the eight most important features to ensure an effective, verifiable Open Access (OA) mandate: (1) All research funding agency OA Mandates need to specify clearly and explicitly that the deposit of each article must be in the author’s institutional repository (so the universities and research institutions can monitor their own output and ensure compliance as well as adopt mandates of their own for their unfunded research output). (2) All mandates should specify that the deposit (of the authors refereed, revised, accepted final draft) must be done immediately upon acceptance for publication (not on the date of publication, which is often much later, variable, not known to the author, and frequently does not even correspond to the journal issue’s published date of publication, if there is one). (3) All mandates should urge (but not require) authors to make their immediate-deposit immediately-OA. (4) All mandates should urge (but not require) authors to reserve the right to make their papers immediately-OA (and other re-use rights) in their contracts with their publishers (as in the Harvard-style mandates). (3) All mandates should shorten (or, better, not even mention) allowable OA embargoes (so as not to encourage publishers to adopt them). (6) All repositories should implement the automated "email eprint request" Button (for embargoed [non-OA] deposits). (7) All mandates should designate repository deposit as the sole mechanism for submitting publications for performance review, research assessment, grant application, or grant renewal. (8) All repositories should implement rich usage and citation metrics in the institutional repositories as incentive for compliance