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This chapter outlines libraries’ (and librarians’) changing identities in the new world of research mandates from funders, institutions, and publishers. As libraries respond to the demands of these mandates on their users at the individual, departmental, and institutional levels, they need to revise their approaches to relationship building and user engagement, as well as maintain flexibility in the face of changing roles and skill requirements. This chapter will (1) outline the changing scholarly ecosystem; (2) summarize major terms and concepts to understand the process of producing research outputs; (3) discuss the perspectives of the major players in the research enterprise; (4) present some of the challenges that research mandates and the changing research environment have brought to libraries; and finally (5) review ways in which libraries have successfully addressed them. The focus here is on the academic research setting, although many of the strategies outlined can be equally applicable in both non-academic research and non-research funding contexts.

Online open access (OA) to research publications comes to scholarship as a vision that makes sense and is congruent with the aims of science and scholarship. It is argued that research, often funded out of the public purse, should be a public good. Given its visionary characteristics and its congruence with the aims of scholarship, the purpose of this paper is to examine why OA is not practiced by all researchers, all the time, or more encouraged by library managers.

The findings reported in the paper are built upon analyses of the literature, the current discussion occurring in e‐lists and other public forums, and upon qualitative research using observation, document analysis, interview techniques and thematic analysis conducted as part of a PhD study in two Australian universities.

One of the universities had a long‐standing institutional mandate to encourage OA and the other did not. In terms of findings, of the universities studied, the institution with the mandate not only had a far greater proportion of its research output in its OA institutional repository but also the researchers and authors interviewed there had a deep understanding of, and engagement with, issues surrounding not just scholarly publishing but also OA and other publishing options. Further, OA and the mandate policy were reported by university executives as providing benefits both to individual researchers and to the institution as a whole.

In analyzing the relationships and entanglements that exist between authors, universities, publishers and other actors we see how these reinforce the current publishing paradigm. While proposals for mandates are not new, this paper illustrates how one is acting in practice. It proposes that despite reservations among academic library managers a mandate can work in practice. Sometimes, a new actor, such as a mandate or deposit policy is required, to assist library and repository managers, to encourage authors to look beyond their existing frames and embrace OA.

This paper aims to analyze open access (OA) scholarly publishing patterns as well as OA policies and mandates across European countries.

The study is based on a descriptive research approach using data from Web resources, directories and bibliographic and citation databases, namely, DOAJ, OpenDOAR, SCImago journal and Country Ranking portal, ROARMAP and Web of Science.

The findings indicate that the initiatives and measures in Europe that promote OA are adequate. OA journals and digital repositories have progressively increased over the past two decades. Of the total journals (n = 25,231) published worldwide and indexed in Scopus, 53% are published in European countries, with 23.7% being OA journals. In total, 34% of the OA repositories (n = 5,714) are in European countries. The proportion of OA journal papers has grown significantly in all European countries, with a 14.3% annual growth rate. The average proportion of OA publications in European countries is significantly higher (39.07%) than the world average (30.16%), with a clear inclination for making research literature openly accessible via the green OA route (79.41%) compared to the gold OA route (52.30%). Most European research funders and institutions have required researchers to make OA available for their research findings, either by publishing them in OA journals or depositing accepted manuscripts in repositories.

The study analyzed OA trends in Europe; other continents and countries were not included in the analysis. The study only described OA policies and mandates; the extent to which the OA policies and mandates were implemented was not studied. However, the results of the study may be helpful to policymakers, funders, research institutions and universities in other countries in adopting and implementing OA policies and mandates.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study is the first that used multiple data sources for investigating different facets of OA publishing in European countries, including OA journals, digital repositories, research output, mandates and policies for publicly funded research. The findings will be helpful for researchers and policymakers interested in promoting OA adoption among researchers worldwide.

The purpose of this paper is to consider how the open access policy environment has developed since the Rights Metadata for Open Archiving Project’s call in 2003 for universities and academics to assert joint copyright ownership of scholarly works and investigate whether UK universities are moving towards a joint copyright ownership.

The paper analyses 81 UK university copyright policies to understand what proportion make a claim over: IP ownership of all outputs; the copyright in scholarly works; re-using scholarly works in specific ways; and approaches to moral rights. Results are cross-tabulated by policy age and mission group.

Universities have not asserted their interest in scholarly works through joint ownership, leaving research funders and publishers to set open access policy. The paper finds an increased proportion of universities assert a generic claim to all IP (87 per cent) relative to earlier studies. In total, 74 per cent of policies relinquished rights in scholarly works in favour of academic staff; 20 per cent of policies share ownership of scholarly works through licensing; 28 per cent of policies assert the right to re-use scholarly works in some way; and 32 per cent of policies seek to protect moral rights. Policies that “share” ownership of scholarly works are more recent. The UK Scholarly Communication Licence (UK-SCL) should have an impact on this area. The reliance on individual academics to enforce a copyright policy or not to opt-out of the UK-SCL could be problematic. The paper concludes that open access may still be best served by joint ownership of scholarly works.

This the first large-scale analysis of UK university policy positions towards scholarly works. The paper discovers for the first time a move towards “shared” ownership of scholarly works in copyright policies.

The paper aims to focus on the current state of open access (OA) initiatives in Zimbabwean universities. The paper specifically reports the initiatives at Zimbabwean universities regarding institutional repositories that promote OA and other digital OA collections.

A qualitative research methodology was adopted. Questionnaires were used as the primary data collection method for this research. The research sought to address the following specific areas: the state of institutional repositories and open access in Zimbabwe, the discoverability of content, open access policies and mandates, the benefits of open access in Zimbabwe, and future plans for institutional OA. A total of eight out of 12 universities responded to the questionnaire. The data provided by the universities involved in the research were summarised to give a general picture of the open access landscape in Zimbabwe.

The current initiatives in the universities involved in this survey indicate that most universities in Zimbabwe are going to have institutional repositories that promote open access to information. Most institutions in Zimbabwe are already working on putting open access policies in place in a bid to promote open access.

The research will shed more light on the status quo of open access initiatives in Zimbabwe, particularly with regards to institutional repositories, open access policies and open access mandates.

This study aims to analyze Open Access (OA) publishing trends and policy perspectives in India. Different aspects, such as the growth of OA journals digital repositories, the proportion of OA availability to research literature and the status of OA mandates and policies are studied.

Data for analyzing OA trends were gathered from multiple data sources, including Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), OpenDOAR, SCImago and Web of Science (WoS) databases. DOAJ and OpenDOAR were used for extracting OA journals and digital repository data. SCImago Journal and Country ranking portal and WoS database were used to obtain Indian publication data for assessing the proportion of OA to research literature. ROARMAP was used to study OA mandates and policies adopted by universities, research institutions and research funders in India. OA mandates and policies of major regulatory bodies and funding agencies were also reviewed using secondary sources of information and related websites.

India ranks number 15 and 17 globally for OA journals and OA repositories, with 317 journals and 98 repositories. Although India’s proportion to OA publications is 23% (7% below the world average of 30%), the annual growth rate of OA publications is around 18%. Although the governing bodies and institutions have made efforts to mandate researchers to adopt OA publishing and self-archiving, its implementation is quite low among Indian researchers, as only three institutions (out of 18 listed in the ROARMAP) are defined the embargo period. Funding agencies in India do not provide financial assistance to authors for the payment of Article Processing Charges despite mandates that research is deposited in OA repositories. India lacks a national OA policy but plans to implement a “one nation one subscription” formula to provide OA to scientific literature to all its citizens.

The study has certain limitations. Because much of India’s research output is published in local journals that are not indexed in WoS, the study recommends conducting further analyses of publications using Scopus and other databases to understand the country’s OA publishing proportion better. A further study based on feedback from different stakeholders through a survey may be conducted for formulating a national OA policy.

The study is the first that used multiple data sources for investigating different facets of OA publishing in India, including OA journals, digital repositories, OA research output and OA mandates and policies for publicly funded research. The findings will be helpful for researchers and policymakers interested in promoting OA adoption among researchers worldwide.

The purpose of this paper is to provide detailed information on how the University of Nottingham established a central fund to pay for open access publication of research coming out of the university in direct response to mandates from research funders.

This case study looks into the steps taken by the University of Nottingham to establish a central, institutional fund for the payment of article processing charges (APC) for open access publications. It also examines the initialisation of processes to support investigators at the university in disseminating their research to a global community. The materials included in the case study were the result of interviews with key stakeholders and the review of policy documents from the university.

The case study demonstrates that a great deal of cooperation among departments is needed in order to establish a central fund for open access publishing.

The University of Nottingham Central Fund is one of the earliest such funds. While this case study provides an excellent road map for establishing future funds, some challenges will be peculiar to individual institutions.

The paper provides detailed information on how a central fund to pay for open access publication of research coming out of a university in direct response to mandates from research funders can be established.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of one of the most important and controversial areas of scholarly communication: Open Access publishing and dissemination of research outputs. It identifies and discusses recent trends and future challenges for various stakeholders in delivering Open Access (OA) to the scholarly literature.

The study is based on a number of interrelated strands of evidence which make up the current discourse on OA, comprising the peer-reviewed literature, grey literature and other forms of communication (including blogs and e-mail discussion lists). It uses a large-scale textual analysis of the peer-reviewed literature since 2010 (carried out using the VOSviewer tool) as a basis for discussion of issues raised in the OA discourse.

A number of key themes are identified, including the relationship between “Green” OA (deposit in repositories) and “Gold” OA (OA journal publication), the developing evidence base associated with OA, researcher attitudes and behaviours, policy directions, management of repositories, development of journals, institutional responses and issues around impact and scholarly communication futures. It suggests that current challenges now focus on how OA can be made to work in practice, having moved on from the discussion of whether it should happen at all.

The paper provides a structured evidence-based review of major issues in the OA field, and suggests key areas for future research and policy development.

Given that repositories were proposed as one of the routes to open access (OA), this study sought to establish the achievements universities in East Africa had attained in initiating institutional repositories (IRs), the challenges in providing OA and strategies for the way forward.

Data were collected through literature searches, using the internet, journal databases and university websites in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda for information about OA and IRs in East Africa. Some of the findings were based on the author’s PhD “The management and accessibility of OA IRs in selected universities in East Africa”, which used face-to-face interviews with six librarians and self-administered questionnaires responded to by 183 researchers at Kenyatta University, Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences and Makerere University.

Universities in East Africa were still in the intermediate stages of embracing OA, and only 40 libraries out of 145 universities had implemented IRs. However, most of the repositories had less than 1,000 items, with this challenge attributed to the absence of institutional and government/funder mandates that affected the collection/provision of OA, in addition to the lack of awareness of IRs among researchers.

The value in this research was establishing the extent of IR initiatives in universities in East Africa and their contribution to OA, which is regarded as more visible and accessible to scholars and government personnel who could leverage the information for further development in the region.

This paper aims to describe the evolution of scientific communication, largely represented by the publication process. It notes the disappearance of the traditional publication on paper and its progressive replacement by electronic publishing, a new paradigm implying radical changes in the whole mechanism. It aims also at warning the scientific community about the dangers of some new avenues and why, rather than subcontracting an essential part of its work, it must take back full control of its production.

The paper reviews the emerging concepts in scholarly publication and aims to answer frequently asked questions concerning free access to scientific literature as well as to data, science and knowledge in general.

The paper provides new observations concerning the level of compliance to institutional open access mandates and the poor relevance of journal prestige for quality evaluation of research and researchers. The results of introducing an open access policy at the University of Liège are noted.

Open access is, for the first time in human history, an opportunity to provide free access to knowledge universally, regardless of either the wealth or the social status of the potentially interested readers. It is an essential breakthrough for developing countries.

Open access and Open Science in general must be considered as common values that should be shared freely. Free access to publicly generated knowledge should be explicitly included in universal human rights. There are still a number of obstacles hampering this goal, mostly the greed of intermediaries who persuade researchers to give their work for free, in exchange for prestige. The worldwide cause of Open Knowledge is thus a major universal issue for the twenty-first century.