Funder mandates and open access: states and universities

A lot of the momentum propelling the open access movement recently has come from self-archiving mandates from public funders of research – specifically, national-level government entities. Green funder mandates are easy to rally around, and very satisfying when they pass. It’s easy to see why: national agencies are among the largest research funders, impacting thousands of articles published annually.

Authors depend on the agencies’ research dollars. Conditioning recourse to those funds on self-archiving the resulting articles creates a highly visible, direct incentive to provide OA. In addition to their effectiveness, green mandates are also low-hanging fruit: public funding bolsters the public interest argument for OA, and green OA is pereceived as less threatening by established commercial publishers (than gold), tempering objections to the policy.

But national agencies are not the only public funders of academic research, at least in the U.S. State and local governments also fund research, as do academic institutions themselves. The dollar figures amount to far less, but the principles are the same; the public access argument applies equally. (Admittedly, some of the institutional funds are from private institutions, rather than public.)

There’s one benefit of national funder mandates that doesn’t apply to state or institutional funder mandates: scale. How much should scale matter to OA supporters? Priorities are certainly a concern: you want the most bang for your buck, so to speak. On the other hand, scale is independent of principle. If OA advocates are sincere when they speak of OA as an extension of public investment in science, it doesn’t matter whether the fund manager is in Washington or Tallahassee: either way, the investors want to maximize their return.

State funders
Speaking of bang for the buck, the relatively dimunitive nature of state and institutional funders may be an advantage. In the U.S. federal system, states act as “laboratories of democracy”, experimenting with new policies. When a state hits upon a good idea, other states and the federal government will adopt it (in theory, at least). OA is a good idea; where are the states willing to try it? (I don’t see any in ROARMAP.)

At the state level, issue advocates may have more access to legislators to express their views. By the same token, however, fewer citizens and groups follow state politics than federal; it’s easier for an issue to be buried in a state capital without anyone noticing (example). In general, state legislators are likely to have less information about policy issues, especially niche ones, than a federal legislator would. State legislators usually receive less feedback from constituents, lobbyists, and experts (again, especially on niche issues); have fewer staff; may only legislate part-time, working their day job the other months of the year; and may be term-limited, unlike Congresspeople, giving the legislator less opportunity to develop policy expertise. Additionally, if publishers spread FUD about copyright, state legislators may be considerably less willing to run the risk of a lawsuit – even a meritless one – than Congresspeople might be (the federal government gets sued all the time).

Importantly, states may choose not to follow the NIH precedent that agencies can’t (or won’t) mandate public access without legislative authorization. In other words, if you can convince the agency it’s the right thing to do, the agency itself could adopt the policy, avoiding the need to legislate.

Another potential difference is the way state funders frame their research output. It seems that federal research is seen primarily as a public good that must be provided – “If we don’t do this, nobody will” – and only secondarily as a means to differentiate the U.S. from its peers or selectively advance American researchers or institutions. For states, the reverse is true: funding is seen as a way to attract top researchers to the state, to improve the competitiveness of institutions in the state, and to stimulate local economies (e.g. by germinating start-ups). As such, increased prestige relative to the peer group will be a key incentive for states to support OA. I can imagine, for example, a repository to showcase state-funded research might be a popular idea among state funders and legislators.

Institutional funders

Few OA supporters spend much time arguing for institutional mandates these days. Why? The structure of most universities in the U.S., particularly the tenure system, place professors in an enviable position relative to their employer. Faculty basically have autonomy as researchers and, often, also bear considerable influence in university governance. It’s hard to make faculty do something they don’t want to do. The unfortunate truth is that self-archiving is not something faculty want to do (at least not yet); if it was, they’d be doing it already, and these mandates would be increasingly irrelevant. At any rate, institutional mandates haven’t much caught on.

Institutional funders, however, may have more leverage, for the simple fact that they fund research. Institutional research funding is directly connected to the research function of academics, so requiring OA as a condition of funding may be more feasible.

A few more observations about institutional funders:

• The governance process for institutional funders will be starkly different than that of government agencies. If advocates can convince the decision-makers that OA is a good idea, a mandate may be rapidly forthcoming. However, advocates may have no leverage over decision-makers, with no recourse to the ballot box.
• In these figures, state grants to institutional funds are counted with the institutional funds, rather than the state. In other words, if a state gives a university $1m and says “Distribute this as you see fit,” that counts for the institution, not the state. I suspect this happens to a considerable extent. State mandates, then, would be upstream of institutions, and should carry forward.
• When an institution is funding its own researchers (as I imagine most institutional funding is distributed), it has a particularly strong argument for requiring deposit. The primary purpose of such funding will be to selectively advantage the institution’s scholars; the funder has a clear case for OA in showcasing such research to improve the institution’s reputation, more so than for a researcher merely employed there.
• Librarians in particular may wish to pursue green mandates for institutional funding, as a means to help populate their beloved institutional repositories.
• If nothing else, raising this issue on one’s campus will encourage discussion of OA, hopefully leading to better awareness and understanding.