4.1 Introduction

OA is a new route to publishing research and other learned literature. The long tradition of publishing in scholarly journals and recognition given to them by the society needs formulation of policies towards OA. These have been turned also as OA mandates of institutions. The institutions could be national research institutions funding agencies or even government. The direct the authors to self-archive their works or publish in Gold OA journals to provide free access to their publications. Funding agencies and organizations have started supporting and promoting OA by mandating that research papers originating from publicly funded projects must be made open. These are mostly non-profitmaking institutions that make it their mission to ensure that research is beneficial and extensively accessible to the intellectual community. The first mandate on OA can be traced back to 2003 when the School of Electronics and Computer Sciences, University of Southampton declared a program based policy for OA [provide OA self-archiving policy at www.ecs.soton.ac.uk]. This was a departmental policy. An institutional mandate gives a major impetus to strength of OA repositories as more authors tend to deposit articles when OA is mandated by their institution than when it is not mandated. Accordingly to a study (Gargouri, 2010), IRs having an institutional mandate has resulted in deposits close to 100% while those without such mandates could only attract about 15% of research output into institutional repositories.

Last modified: Tuesday, 13 April 2021, 12:05 PM