Do Authors Deposit on Time? Tracking Open Access Policy Compliance Drahomira Herrmannova Nancy Pontika Petr Knoth Knowledge Media Institute Knowledge Media Institute Knowledge Media Institute The Open University The Open University The Open University Milton Keynes, United Kingdom Milton Keynes, United Kingdom Milton Keynes, United Kingdom orcid.org/0000-0002-2730-1546 orcid.org/0000-0002-2091-0402 orcid.org/0000-0003-1161-7359
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT vs. post-print) should be made openly accessible [17]. Arguably Recent years have seen fast growth in the number of policies man- one of the most significant OA policies, the UK Research Excel- 3 dating Open Access (OA) to research outputs. We conduct a large- lence Framework (REF) 2021 Open Access Policy , was introduced scale analysis of over 800 thousand papers from repositories around in the UK in March 2014 [8]. The significance of this policy lies the world published over a period of 5 years to investigate: a) if the in two aspects: 1) the requirement to make research outputs OA time lag between the date of publication and date of deposit in a is linked to performance review, creating a strong incentive for repository can be effectively tracked across thousands of reposito- compliance [25, 29, 30], and 2) it affects over 5% of global research 4 ries globally, and b) if introducing deposit deadlines is associated outputs . Under this policy, only compliant research outputs will with a reduction of time from acceptance to public availability of be evaluated in the national Research Excellence Framework.