Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A funder policy requiring that every peer-reviewed article resulting from its grants be made open access within 6 months of publication, either via repository deposit or gold OA.
- Is an instance
A university-wide policy under which faculty grant the institution a non-exclusive licence to deposit their accepted manuscripts in the institutional repository regardless of publisher embargo terms (a rights-retention mandate).
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A funder that merely encourages, but does not require, open access publication is expressing a preference or recommendation, not a mandate.
Editorial commentary
An open access mandate is a formal policy, issued by a research funder, an institution, or, less commonly, a government, that requires researchers to make the outputs of the funded or affiliated research openly accessible, typically within a specified timeframe and often via a specific route: deposit in a repository, publication in an open-access venue, or either. Mandates differ in scope and strictness. Some apply only to the final peer-reviewed manuscript (green open access via repository deposit), others require gold open access publication, and some, such as Rights Retention Strategy policies, require authors to retain and exercise a licence over their own accepted manuscript regardless of what a publisher’s own policy says.
Plan S, the cOAlition S funder initiative, is the best-known multi-funder open access mandate: it requires immediate open access to peer-reviewed publications from funded research, generally under a CC BY licence. National and institutional mandates vary considerably in requirements and enforcement; some tie compliance to future funding eligibility, others rely on reporting and moral suasion. Researchers should check the specific mandate that applies to a given grant or institution rather than assume a uniform standard, since embargo lengths, acceptable licences, and permitted routes to compliance differ from funder to funder.
See MIT and Harvard’s Institutional Rights-Retention Open Access Policies Compared and Rights Retention Strategy: Funder-Publisher Conflict for how specific mandates play out in practice.
Also known as
OA mandate
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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vocab-term="Open access mandate"
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"datePublished": "2026-05-19T19:12:29",
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