Skip to main content
Literature Review Article

Do Open Access Mandates Work? A Systematized Review of the Literature on Open Access Publishing Rates

Authors
  • Elena Azadbakht (University of Nevada, Reno)
  • Tara Radniecki orcid logo (University of Nevada, Reno)
  • Teresa Auch Schultz orcid logo (University of Nevada, Reno)
  • Amy Shannon (University of Nevada, Reno)

Abstract

To encourage the sharing of research, various entities—including public and private funders, universities, and academic journals—have enacted open access (OA) mandates or data sharing policies. It is unclear, however, whether these OA mandates and policies increase the rate of OA publishing and data sharing within the research communities impacted by them. A team of librarians conducted a systematized review of the literature to answer this question. A comprehensive search of several scholarly databases and grey literature sources resulted in 4,689 unique citations. However, only five articles met the inclusion criteria and were deemed as having an acceptable risk of bias. This sample showed that although the majority of the mandates described in the literature were correlated with a subsequent increase in OA publishing or data sharing, the presence of various confounders and the differing methods of collecting and analyzing the data used by the studies’ authors made it impossible to establish a causative relationship.

Keywords: open access mandates, systematized reviews, effectiveness, data sharing policies

How to Cite:

Azadbakht, E., Radniecki, T., Schultz, T. A. & Shannon, A., (2023) “Do Open Access Mandates Work? A Systematized Review of the Literature on Open Access Publishing Rates”, Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 11(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.15444

Rights: © 2023 The Author(s). License: CC BY 4.0

Downloads:
Download PDF
View PDF

1945 Views

304 Downloads

Published on
2023-04-08

Peer Reviewed