4.3 Publication Policies of Major Research Funders

OA advocacy has impacted OA growth gradually. One of the major reasons for growth can be attributed to major funding agencies' OA policy. The well-known slogan of OA is that researchresults out of public funds must be available to public free of costs. Hence it is evident that OA concept was tied to the funding modes. When one of riders for funding research is that research results must be published as OA, naturally it gives a major impetus to the growth in OA content. Some of the OA policies of funding agencies are discussed in the sections that follow.

4.3.1 IES Mandate

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES), part of the US Department of Education, has an open access mandate for IES-funded research. The mandate functions in the same way as NIH, in that the author’s final version of the manuscript must be deposited, and there can be up to a 12-month delay before it is made available. The difference is that deposits go to the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) rather than PubMedCentral.

4.3.2 Wellcome Trust (UK) OA Mandate

The Wellcome Trust, an independent charity that funds research to improve human and animal health, is the largest private funder of medical research in the UK. In October, 2005, it became first research funding agency in the world to require open access to all publications resulting from its grants. The Wellcome Trust position statement in support of open and unrestricted access to published research requires that “any research papers that have been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, and are supported in whole or in part by Wellcome Trust funding, to be deposited into PubMed Central (PMC) or UK PMC, to be made freely available as soon as possible and in any event within six months of the journal publisher’s official date of final publication.”

4.3.3 The World Bank OA Policy

The World Bank has employed an Open Access policy for its intellectual outputs and knowledge products, effective since July 2012. The policy aims to increase access to information at the World Bank and to make is research as extensively accessible as possible. For the first phase of this policy, the Bank launched a new Open Knowledge Repository and adopted a set of Creative Commons copyright licenses.

4.3.4 UNESCO Open Access Policy

UNESCO adopted an Open Access policy32 in 2013, which grants access to its digital publications to millions of people. The organization has become the first member of the United Nations to adopt this type of Open Access policy for its publications. Hundreds of files will be available through a specially launched Open Access Repository with a multilingual interface. All new publications will be released with an open license. UNESCO policy aims increase visibility, accessibility, and rapid distribution of its publications. In addition to adopting open access policy for its own publications UNESCO has been one of key facilitators of open access activities and initiatives. In order to create an enabling policy environment for OA UNESCO published Policy Guidelines for development and promotion of Open Access (Swan, 2012). This publication is intended serve the needs of OA policy development at the government, institutional and funding agency level. The overall objective of the Policy Guidelines is to promote Open Access in Member States by facilitating understanding of all relevant issues related to Open Access.

4.3.5 Canadian Institutes of Health Research OA Policy

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) announced an open access policy that took effect in January, 2008. It requires those receiving grant funds from CIHR to “make every effort to ensure” their research works are made accessible to public within six months of publication. 


Last modified: Tuesday, 13 April 2021, 12:11 PM