Success Rate of the First of the Self-Archiving Mandates: Southampton ECS

---

SUMMARY: Adopted in January 2003, the self-archiving mandate of the University of Southampton Department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) was the world's first. It has since served as a model for a growing number of such mandates worldwide. (As of October 2007, 32 funder and institutional/departmental Green OA self-archiving mandates have been adopted, and 8 more proposed.) In 2004-5, two large international, interdisciplinary author surveys by Alma Swan had predicted that the willing compliance rate for such self-archiving mandates would be over 80%. In 2005-6, Arthur Sale estimated from data on actual depositing behaviour in Australian repositories that mandates would reach Swan's predicted compliance rate in about two years.
    Now Southampton's Les Carr has confirmed Swan's survey predictions and Sale's Australian extrapolations: the ECS Departmental Repository's deposit rate in 2006 is over 80% for an ISI Web of Knowledge sample and nearly 100% for an ACM Digital Library sample. This should encourage other universities to adopt self-archiving mandates and help persuade US legislators to upgrade the failed NIH "public access" policy to a mandate in the next US Senate Appropriations Bill.

---

Set in motion by Prof. Tony Hey in 1999, drafted in 2001, and officially adopted by Prof. Wendy Hall in January 2003, the self-archiving mandate of the University of Southampton Department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) was the world's first. It has since served as a model for a growing number of Green OA mandates worldwide. As of October 2007, 32 funder and institutional/departmental Green OA self-archiving mandates have been adopted, and 8 more proposed, for a total of 40 to date.

In 2004-5, Dr. Alma Swan, of Key Perspectives Associates, on the basis of two large international, interdisciplinary author surveys, had predicted (in the face of widespread scepticism about the likely success of self-archiving mandates) that the willing compliance rate for self-archiving mandates would be over 80% (with total compliance over 90%).



In 2005-6, Prof. Arthur Sale, in a study comparing data on actual deposit rates for three Australian universities (two unmandated and one, Queensland University of Technology, mandated since 2004), found that yearly deposit rates for the repositories without mandates remained low (c. 15%), even with incentives and library assistance (c. 30%), whereas the mandated deposits grew much faster. Extrapolating these growth rates, he estimated that mandates would reach Swan's predicted compliance rate (80-90%) in about two years.

Dr. Les Carr, co-drafter of the ECS mandate and now also the administrator of Southampton's ECS Departmental Repository, has now confirmed Swan's survey predictions and Sale's Australian extrapolations. ECS's deposit rate in 2006 (the fourth full year of the ECS mandate) is over 80% for an ISI Web of Knowledge sample and nearly 100% for an ACM Digital Library sample.



This should encourage other universities to adopt self-archiving mandates. (Sale especially recommends starting at the departmental level rather than waiting for university-wide consensus, if consensus is not reached quickly: a "patchwork" mandate.)

The demonstrated success of institutional self-archiving mandates also has implications for research-funder and national-level policy: In the US, the proposed NIH self-archiving "public access" policy was downgraded from a mandate to a mere request; adopted in 2004, it has failed, miserably (deposit rate <5%). Let us hope that the evidence of the success rates for Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates will help open the eyes of US legislators to the need to upgrade the NIH policy to a mandate in the next US Senate Appropriations Bill.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum