Ask Us: Scholarly Communications

Yes. The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences pioneered this type of policy in 2008. Since then, other schools at Harvard have adopted similar policies, as have faculty at a number of other institutions large and small, public and private. In 2018, then SUNY Chancellor Kristina M. Johnson passed a resolution directing each SUNY campus to develop local open access policies.

Research funders are supporting similar efforts. For example, the National Institutes of Health have for many years required the posting in an open access repository of articles derived from research they fund. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Wellcome Trust, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also require any scholarly articles on research they fund to be made openly accessible. In January 2014, the European Commission began requiring articles produced with funding from Horizon 2020, the EU's research and innovation funding program for 2014-2020, to be made open access by the publisher immediately upon publication or to be deposited in a repository and made open access no later than 6-12 months after publication. Similarly, UK Research and Innovation too has an Open Access Policy. On February 22, 2013, the Obama administration issued a directive that requires all federal agencies with annual research and development budgets of $100 million or more to make articles reporting on the results of this research open access after a 12 month embargo period. In September 2018, European funding bodies announced Plan S which will require researchers they fund to publish their articles in fully open access journals or OA platforms starting in 2020.

ROARMAP lists well over 700 open access policies adopted by academic institutions, departments, and research funders worldwide.