Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/99

 of Open Access Journals coming to a total of half a million articles; a fairly staggering achievement. This has been reﬂected elsewhere on the American continent with the president of Mexico signing amendments to various national laws in May 2014 to create the National Repository of Open Access to Quality Scientiﬁc, Technological and Innovative Information Resources of Social and Cultural Interest. This is a national-level green OA repository with mandated deposit for any publicly funded work, although the mandate has been criticised by advocates for its weak wording and potential loopholes.84

Open access in Australia also marches ahead. Both the Health and Medical Research Council and the Australian Research Council have OA mandates that require green deposit of articles with a maximum of a twelve-month embargo. All Australian universities now have institutional repositories. Researchers are also allowed to spend 2% of grants awarded by these organisations on article processing charges to facilitate gold. It is unclear how the current massive funding cuts to Australian higher education will affect these provisions. By contrast, there is no governmental policy on open access in New Zealand but there have been individual institutional mandates at Otago Polytechnic, Lincoln University and the University of Waikato.85

According to Ted Hewitt, the Executive Vice-President of Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Canadian efforts in open access have focused heavily upon the green approach and a uniﬁed policy from the three federal research funding agencies, including the SSHRC, was expected in September 2014. Since 2006, the SSHRC has had an awareness-raising, optional policy that supported and encouraged transitions to open access. The current state of feedback on draft provisions indicates similar emergent anxieties as those experienced by countries further along the process (quality, career progression etc.).

Michel Marian, of the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research, and Serge Bauin, an open-access expert at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientiﬁque observed that there is currently a mixed open-access ecosystem of both green and gold at work in France. However, the high degree of institutional budgetary autonomy in this country has led to most efforts centring on individually controlled institutional repositories. It is also important to note that