Opening the Door: How Faculty Authors Can Implement an Open Access Policy at their Institutions

The authors are lawyers at Covington and Burling. Excerpt: "This White Paper is intended as a companion to the “Open Door and Open Minds” SPARC/Science Commons White Paper of April 2008. The purpose of this companion paper is to provide the legal and statutory bases for implementation of an open access policy, as well as to explain best practices for implementation of that policy. It is intended to be used by faculty and administrators interested in implementing an open access policy at their own educational institutions....This paper will focus on the issues presented by the Harvard/MIT policy and will describe how institutions and faculty can go about implementing a similar policy, using the Harvard/MIT policy as a model. Standard language in open access policies will undoubtedly have positive network effects...."