Sciences, a recent 2013 directive required all data from publicly funded research to be archived and made available to the public. While the USA’s system is much more devolved and decentralised than its counterparts in many other countries, federal funding agencies are now implementing their specific policies and procedures with a twelve-month embargo for greenly deposited content. The National Institute of Health has required a deposit in a subject repository called PubMed Central since 2008 and sanctions for non-compliance are now in place. Of more direct relevance, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) directly funded the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to the tune of $1m in 2012, an open access project that aims to digitise and make available historical material from library collections that is out of copyright. Likewise, when digital humanities projects produce software outputs, the NEH strongly encourages (but does not mandate) that the results be open source.87 This said, general awareness of open access, especially in the humanities, remains fairly low in the States and most OA mandates, where they do exist, are more likely to come from individual institutions rather than any state or funder requirement.
Finally, in the United Kingdom, there are green and gold mandates from HEFCE (the Higher Education Funding Council for England) and RCUK respectively. For any post-2014 Research Excellence Framework, it is a requirement that the ‘accepted and final peer-reviewed text’ of any journal article be uploaded to ‘an institutional repository, a repository service shared between multiple institutions, or a subject repository such as arXiv’ and that this be done ‘as soon after the point of acceptance as possible, and no later than three months after this date’.88 Monographs and edited collections are excluded from these requirements. Various exemptions are allowed, although these are mostly concerned with instances where deposit would be illegal (threats to national security etc.). There is one exception for when ‘the publication concerned actively disallows open-access deposit in a repository, and was the most appropriate publication for the output’.89 Since the overwhelming majority of publications for REF2014 would have been admissible for green deposit, however, it is not expected that this exemption will be frequently invoked. The maximum allowable embargo for
