On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 11:03 AM, wrote:

Dear Professor Harnad
How may institutions monitor their authors' deposits immediately on acceptance since isn't the date of acceptance normally known only to the author and the publisher?  Some journals publish each article's date of initial submission and date of acceptance, but this good practice is not as common as it should be in the journals I know.
Regards

Glad you asked! (And I've anonymized this so I could post my reply too.)

The solution is extremely simple: After submission, peer-review, revision, re-refereeing and re-submission, the author always receives an acceptance letter indicating that the final draft has now been accepted and no more revision or re-refereeing is required. 

That date-stamped letter should be deposited in the institutional repository (in closed access) alongside the full-text of the final, accepted draft (whether in closed or open access). The institution's responsibility is to monitor and ensure that its authors deposit their final drafts at or around the date of acceptance in order to comply with the conditions of the funder. (Institutions are always extremely eager and resourceful in making sure their researchers fulfill the conditions of their funders.)

(Probably just the requirement to have the dated acceptance letter ready for verification in comparing date of acceptance with date of deposit would be sufficient to get researchers to do the right thing even without having to deposit the acceptance letter. The date of acceptance is also the natural point in their workflow for depositing the final draft: they still have it, and they know it's been accepted.)

On no account should the publisher be relied upon to provide the data on date of acceptance (just as they should not be relied upon to comply with the requirement to provide open access, which is a requirement on the fundee, not on the publisher, who has a conflict of interest, and an interest in delaying OA as long as possible!)

Hope that helps,

Stevan Harnad