EUA ’S OPEN ACCESS CHECKLIST FOR UNIVERSITIES: A PRACTICAL GUIDE ON IMPLEMENTATION

" ... EUA, too, has been monitoring developments in Open Access, namely from an institutional perspective. Already in 2007, EUA created a working group tasked with providing initial recommendations on Open Access 3 to its membership and, in 2012, in the framework of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU)4 signed between EUA and the European Commission, EUA committed to encourage universities to implement Open Access policies at the institutional level. In this context, EUA created a task force composed of experts representing three National Rectors’ Conferences5 , with the aim of monitoring developments in the area of Open Access and providing support to EUA in European-level dialogues on this matter. More recently, EUA has published a briefing paper on Open Access to research publications, with an emphasis on European policy developments6 , which showed that, for the wide variety of stakeholders considered in the paper (e.g. National Rectors Conferences, university and science associations): '(…) the[ir] positions remain aligned in terms of their support for an OA policy to research publications, either through the green or gold routes. The stakeholder positions provide pertinent information highlighting, for instance, the importance of developing institutional policies and strategies that foster the availability of research findings in general, and the establishment of institutional repositories in particular.' The briefing paper also identified some key topics that EUA will continue to monitor and explore, in order to support its membership in the area of Open Access. These topics include business models and costs of Open Access, requirements for self-archiving publications in repositories, peer-review and quality assessment in Open Access, assessing the progress of Open Access and its impact on the advancements of research, as well as implications for key stakeholders (e.g. researchers, institutions, policy-makers, scientific publishers).  Following the publication of EUA’s briefing paper on Open Access to research publications, a survey addressed to the EUA membership on the topic of Open Access was conducted in the last quarter of 20147 . Its aim was to collect institutional information on the key topics on Open Access identified in the briefing paper, as well as to provide a more in-depth understanding of the state of play in the development of institutional policies on Open Access and their degree of implementation in European higher education institutions. The results of this survey revealed institutions’ perceived need for practical guidelines on Open Access implementation. This checklist has therefore been developed with a view to help fulfil this need and to complement EUA’s work on Open Access – providing key information on Open Access policies and supporting the development of Open Access in European universities ..."