Talk:Open-access mandate

Wikidata list of policies

OA policy anniversaries in Wikidata: < https://w.wiki/8DF >. -- Oa01 (talk) 14:41, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Exploiting loopholes to undermine/negate the intent of Open Access mandates

The Wikipedia page for "Open Access mandate" should discuss loopholes in OA laws/regulations/mandates that permit publishers to subvert the intent of Open Access and largely negate the benefits to readers while (perhaps) adhering to the letter of the law. Wikipedia should also discuss specific cases where such loopholes have been exploited to the detriment of the public.

For example, in late December 2025 the Association for Computing Machinery Digital Library (ACM DL) installed a new paywall on previously free/open complementary facilities that are necessary for finding OA articles and for understanding the computing literature as a coherent whole. The net result is that the ACM DL is less useful today (23 Jan 2026) than it was in early December 2025, despite the fact that the ACM DL nominally became "Open Access" on 1 Jan 2026 (a hotly disputed claim). Details about the new paywall on crucial complementary facilities and the widespread opposition to it are available here:

By analogy, the books in the library are available to the public OA, but the card catalog (Advanced Search) is paywalled. An OA article might as well not exist if you can't find it. Advanced Search isn't the only important ACM DL facility to which free/open public access have been revoked; others include "Cited-By" tracing, Author Profile pages (individual author bibliographies), and bibliometrics. The publicly visible version of the ACM DL has been deliberately crippled by the new paywall.

To borrow the words of an oath of office used in the United States, Open Access mandates must be implemented "without mental reservation or purpose of evasion." Otherwise most of the benefits of OA are negated. ~2026-49914-6 (talk) 13:00, 23 January 2026 (UTC)