According to Mariano Campoy-Quiles, there is a discordance between the mandates of the European Union, which require researchers to make their peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers public before 6 months after their publication, and the journal publishers, who force the researchers to wait at least 6 months before making the article public.

"Or the European Union should ban the moratoriums of the publishers, or they should accomodate to the publishers timelines and not force researchers to make public their work before the time required by the publishers. The collateral damage between the ERC mandates and the publishers requirements has direct consequences to the researchers and the progress of their research."

Alejandro Santos affirms that there is a need to raise awareness of the Open Access mandates among the researchers' community. At ICMAB, most of the researchers follow the green-route, in which the postprints of the published articles are uploaded to the DIGITAL CSIC repository (currently, 62 % of the articles published at ICMAB in 2016 are found now in the DIGITAL CSIC repository). However, the main disadvantage of this route, although much more economic, is that the mandates of the funding agencies are not fulfilled (in terms of deadlines requirements). 

Although the number of articles of the Institute in Open Access journals is still low - slightly growing in the past years (5 % in 2015, 11 % in 2016 and 12 % in 2017), Alejandro has perceived

"a growing and solid interest in Open Access, and a widespread concern about the impossibility, especially economic, to strictly comply with all the mandates, the discordance between European Union and funding agencies' deadlines, and the (not so clear) consequences of not being able to accomplish with all the mandates."

Read the interviews of CSIC Abierto 16 here, and the news at the ICMAB Library website here. 

About CSIC Abierto issue 16

CSIC Abierto gives information and disseminates the contents of the DIGITAL CSIC institutional repository, and informs about the work done by researchers and librarians of the different research institutes to raise awareness of its use. In its issue number 16, CSIC Abierto approaches the ICMAB and the "Instituto de Carboquímica de Zaragoza" to gather some opinions on the open access mandates of H2020 and Plan Nacional de Investigación, and to know how the affected researchers are meeting the requirements and how the library services support them.

This issue also pays special attention to the impact of data policies of scientific journals on the habits of researchers, in terms of disseminating their research data, and includes an interview with two researchers from the Biological Station of Doñana about Open Data opportunities and possible improvements in its management. The open CSIC research section ends with an interview with the CSIC team that participates in the European Digital Humanities project PARTHENOS.

The issue is completed with a selection of the main novelties in DIGITAL.CSIC in the recent months, such as the Portal of “DIGITAL.CSIC Abierto para…”, a new template to describe datasets and new training materials on policies and services of the repository on the one hand, and on open access and Clinical Medicine, on the other. In addition, CSIC Abierto 16 echoes RePEc's 20th anniversary with an interview with one of its founders.