AN OPEN ACCESS MANDATE IN ICELAND

"Recently Bifröst University became the first higher education institution in Iceland to adopt an Open Access mandate....The mandate, which is closely modelled on similar ones passed by for instance Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and by the Harvard Law School, was then taken up by the Bifrost University Council, which gave it a status as a university wide policy. Below is a rough translation of the text....? Bifröst University is a fairly small institution, even by Icelandic standards; the process of reaching an agreement is perhaps not as long winding as in larger organizations. Nevertheless, it took some discussion to reach an agreement, and the focus that helped in the discussions at Biföst were: 1) keeping the message simple; 2) the use of exemplary institutions abroad as a reference; 3) the benefit of being early adopters in your area; 4) the idea of Open Access as a public good, and 5) emphasize the opt out available in exceptional cases....The next part of the mandate [faculty will make their work OA "either by publishing in open access research journals or by depositing them in a research repository"] differs from the Harvard one. With the mention of Open Access journals in the Bifröst mandate, the emphasis is on the University’s commitment to OA publishing..."