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Besides the Spanish Science, Technology and Innovation Act, the Royal Decree 99/2011, of 28 January, that regulates official PhD training programs, states that an electronic copy of every doctoral thesis approved in any Spanish university should be deposited into the corresponding open access institutional repository.

To aid in the process of a correct implementation of both mandates, a remarkable initiative of the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) was to create a working group of experts that worked in a set of recommendations for decision makers, universities and public research centres, researchers, and big deals scientific journals subscriptions on how to comply with the new obligations derived from OA policies.

Following these recommendations, a Steering Committee was set to monitoring the level of compliance with the OA mandate at the state-level. This steering committee is coordinated by FECYT. Their first report, Steering Committee report on the compliance of Spanish Science Act mandate (2016) developed a first methodological approach as well as pointed out limitations on the identification of open access publicly funded research outputs. A second set of recommendations were published in 2017 Towards Open Access by default.