From Peter Suber's blog
University policies are the next step for OA John Lorinc, The bottom line on open access, University Affairs, March 2006. Also available in French. (Thanks to Stevan Harnad.) Excerpt: The rapidly evolving debate over free online scholarship drives right to the heart of some of the most fundamental questions about research....Worldwide, there are about 24,000 scholarly journals, but only three to seven percent of them are considered to be open access OA for short meaning that they make their research papers available for free on the Internet. But the rapidly evolving debate over open-access scholarship extends well beyond academic journals like the [new] one at www.econtheory.org, and drives right to the heart of some of the most fundamental questions about research: Do publicly funded universities and granting bodies have a democratic indeed a moral obligation to ensure that academic scholarship is available on the Internet? What kinds of public and institutional policies are needed to make such wide-ranging dissemination both possible and useful? And what are the implications for publishers, research libraries, copyright, and for scholarship itself? Few self-respecting researchers argue with the idea per se. Its easy to get people to sign off on a principle, says Stevan Harnad, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science at Université du Québec à Montréal. It becomes interesting and substantive when you take a practical policy. Since the mid-1990s, Dr. Harnad has been at the centre of an international campaign to promote open access. But its only in the last three or four years since the George Soros Open Society Institute orchestrated a 2002 summit of OA activists in Budapest that granting bodies and universities have begun to look hard at how to translate open access from a feel-good cyber principle into something entrenched in the way academics do business either by encouraging them to patronize open-access journals or urging them to routinely upload all their published research papers to a growing network of institutional repositories. The right to know is at the forefront [of OA], says John Willinsky, a language and literacy education professor at the University of British Columbia who heads the Public Knowledge Project, a research initiative that asks whether and how online technologies can improve the quality of academic research. The critical point were at now is mandated access. Were seeing a momentum build. The epistemological benefits are difficult to dispute. Dr. Harnad refers to studies showing that citations can more than double for articles that are freely available on the web. Accessible online papers benefit academics in poor countries where universities have few resources. And research libraries see institutional electronic repositories as one way of ensuring the preservation of digitized online material that is highly vulnerable to the problem of disappearing URLs....In the past few years, large research councils in the U.S. and U.K. have grappled with the mechanics of applying the OA principle to publicly funded research. In Canada, in late 2004, the board of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council approved OA in principle; council staff are preparing recommendations based on public consultations....But open-access advocates contend that universities must now step up to the plate and adopt policies that compel faculty to self-archive....Tim Mark, executive director of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, describes...the absurd situation whereby academics working for publicly funded institutions give up their intellectual property rights to commercial journal publishers, who turn around and sell the fruits of their labour right back to those institutions in the form of costly journal subscriptions....The potential of the OA movement, [Harnad] argues, doesnt begin with policy conditions aimed at altering the operating conditions for a small subset of journal publishers [to make them convert to OA]. Rather, it needs a much broader-based effort to make institutional self-archiving a routine and unquestioned part of the work of scholarship as basic as including bibliographies and reference lists at the end of any paper. OA advocates say the pieces for such a cultural change are beginning to fall into place. There are now numerous open-source software and harvesting systems that allow institutions to create searchable, indexed and networked electronic repositories....But, as Dr. Harnad observes, the availability of user-friendly archiving software is necessary but not sufficient. Thats why, in 2005, OA activists approved the Berlin 3 institutional policy commitment. It calls on universities and research institutions to establish policies requiring academics to self-archive, as well as encouraging them to publish in open-access journals....So far 17 universities and research institutions including the University of Zurich, Portugals University of Minho, and the University of Southampton, where Dr. Harnad taught before joining UQAM have signed the 2005 Berlin commitment. No Canadian universities are signatories. How do academics feel about self-archiving? Authors havent picked it up, says Dr. Willinsky at UBC. It has a lot to do with the fact that the focus of [academics] work is getting published, not getting circulated. Indeed, a U.K. survey of scholars showed that about half of the respondents had self-archived at one point, mainly on personal websites, but many didnt do it routinely. Yet 95 percent said theyd be prepared to self-archive if their university required it as a condition of tenure or employment. Whats become increasingly apparent is that copyright issues arent a roadblock for the OA movement....While journal publishers, from giants like Elsevier to upstarts like Econtheory.org, will continue to work out a sustainable online business model, the OA policy ball has now landed squarely in the university sectors court.