Friends: Here is additional for the need for mandating from Australia. We in India (and other developing countries) should not delay any further. We should go ahead and mandate OA for all publicly funded research. Best wishes. Subbiah Arunachalam -------------------
From Peter Suber's blog
OA mandates work better than requests Arthur Sale, Comparison of content policies for institutional repositories in Australia, First Monday, April 2006. Abstract: Seven Australian universities have established institutional repositories (containing research articles, also known as eprints) that can be analyzed for content and which were in operation during 2004 and 2005. This short paper analyses their content and shows that a requirement to deposit research output into a repository coupled with effective author support policies works in Australia and delivers high levels of content. Voluntary deposit policies do not, regardless of any author support by the university. This is consistent with international data.