An Open Access Self Archiving Mandate[1][2] is a policy—adopted by a research institution (e.g., a university), a research funder or a government—that requires researchers (e.g., university faculty or research grant recipients) to make their published, peer-reviewed journal and conference papers open access (freely accessible to all potential users online, OA) by depositing their final, peer-reviewed drafts in an open access institutional repository or central repository. ROARMAP, the searchable Registry of Open Access Repository Mandatory Archiving Policies at the University of Southampton indexes the world's institutional, funder and governmental OA mandates (and the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS) as well as EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS) graph the quarterly outcome).
In international, cross-disciplinary surveys conducted by Swan (2005),[3] the vast majority of researchers respond that they would self archive willingly if their institutions or funders mandated it. Outcome studies by Sale (2006) [4] have confirmed these survey results. The growth rate of both mandated and unmandated institutional repositories worldwide is tracked by the University of Southampton's Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
Open Access Self Archiving has been mandated by over 150 universities (and parts of universities) worldwide (for example, in the US, Harvard and MIT, and in the EU, University College London and ETH Zürich) as well as over 50 research funders (including NIH in the US and RCUK and ERC in the EU). Mandate policy models and guidance have been provided by the Open Society Institute's EPrints Handbook, EOS, OASIS and Open Access Archivangelism.