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 research infrastructures, and the introduction of open access policies for part of the Framework 7 programme and by the European Research Council.

3.46. These policies and initiatives varied as between encouraging and requiring open access, in the extent to which any requirement for deposit and access via repositories was mitigated by embargo periods, and in whether or how they were backed up by the provision of funding to meet the costs of publishing in open access journals. They also vary in the extent to which they have been policed or enforced. Even the Wellcome Trust, which has been the most generous in its arrangements for funding for open access publishing, has seen compliance with its policies requiring deposit of articles in the UK PubMedCentral repository reach only around 55 per cent.

Institutional policies

3.47. Policies from individual universities and other research institutions to promote or require open access have been somewhat slower to emerge. In the US, Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences introduced in 2008 a policy under which its staff grant the university a nonexclusive, irrevocable right to distribute their articles for any non-commercial purpose, and articles are stored, preserved, and made freely accessible in digital form in Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH), the University’s open access repository. Other US universities have followed with similar policies. In the UK, universities from across the sector—including University College London, and the Universities of Leicester, Salford and Abertay Dundee —have introduced policies to require deposit of publications in their institutional repositories. But the policies are qualified by such terms as ‘copyright permissions allowing’ and ‘where publisher agreements permit’. As with funders’ policies, it is not clear how extensively the policies are policed, and rates of compliance are as yet not high. These issues are considered further in Section 4.

Publisher and learned society concerns