Open Access Policies - General Information

A number of agencies in the US and Europe have developed policies--usually referred to as "public access policies"--that support free public access to scholarly research.

Examples of funding agencies developing policies on public access and open access:

• National Institutes of Health (NIH), requires that NIH-funded journal articles be avilable to the public on PubMed Central.
• Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), offers a public access policy that states that all papers funded by CIHR must be freely available online.
• Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) requries that the articles it funds be avilable freely online and has an agreement to pay the processing charges if published in BioMed Central.
• Wellcome Trust, the United Kingdom's leading biomedical research-funding chartiy, now encourages the formation of open access journals and repositories and commits the trust to paying publication charges for Wellcome Trust-funded research "by permitting Trust researchers to use contingency funds for this purpose."
• The eight UK Research Councils, under the umbrella of Research Councils UK (RCUK), have proposed that research papers arising from council-funded work be depositied in openly available repositories.

Higher Education Open-Access Policies

• MIT Adopts A University-wide OA Mandate
• Another First, as MIT Faculty Adopts "Univerity-wide" Open Access Policy
• First Humanities Department to Mandate Open Access - University of Oregon Department of Romance Languages
• Library Faculty Open Access Policy
• Harvard Faculty Adopts Open-Access Requirement
• Harvard Passes OA Mandate
• OA Motion at Stanford University School of Education
• Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP)

Resources for Advocacy

• Public Access Policies, Association of Research Libraries
• Resources for Public Access Policies, Alliance for Taxpayer Access from the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition