SPARC has released Campus-Based Open-Access Publishing Funds.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has released a new guide and supporting Web resource exploring campus-based open-access publishing funds. Authored by SPARC Consultant Greg Tananbaum, these timely new resources survey the current North American landscape of open-access funds and explore key emerging questions on how such funds are considered and developed on college and university campuses.

Open-access funds are resources created to address article-processing fees (APCs) that may be associated with publishing in an open-access journal. These fees are a source of revenue for many open-access publishers (including the Public Library of Science, Hindawi, and the Optical Society of America), as well as for subscription-based publishers experimenting with "open choice" or "hybrid" options, where individual articles are made freely available with the upon payment of an APC.

The new guide, "Open-access publishing funds: A practical guide to design and implementation," and Web resource contain a wealth of background information to inform libraries, authors, administrators and interested others on the practical considerations surrounding open-access funds. The site features up-to-date information on:

• Active open-access funds (at the University of California at Berkeley, University of Calgary, and several other institutions);
• FAQ for authors, administrators, and publishers;
• Considerations in evaluating the launch of a fund;
• Key policy decisions;
• Implementation tools;
• Resource allocation;
• Fund promotion and reporting and more.

To ensure that this resource stays current, readers are invited to contribute their experiences through the online commenting and discussion features that are available.

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society has made Peter Suber on the Future of Open Access available on YouTube.

Duke University's Digital Futures Task Force has written a "Draft Discussion Document for Duke Open Access Policy" for consideration.

Here's an excerpt:

Each Faculty member grants to Duke University permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to reproduce and distribute those articles for the purpose of open dissemination. In legal terms, each Faculty member grants to Duke University a nonexclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do so, provided that the articles are not sold. The Duke faculty author remains the copyright owner unless that author chooses to transfer the copyright to a publisher.

The policy will apply to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Provost or Provost's designate will waive application of the license for a particular article or delay access for a specified period of time upon written request by a Faculty member.

To assist the University in distributing the scholarly articles, each faculty member will make available, as of the date of publication or upon request, an electronic copy of the final author’s version of the article at no charge to a designated representative of the Provost’s Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost's Office. The Provost's Office will make the article available to the public in Duke’s open-access repository. In cases where the Duke license has been waived or an embargo period has been mutually agreed, the article may be archived in a Duke repository without open access for the period of the embargo, or permanently in cases of waiver.

Read more about it at "Information Wants to Be Sustainable."

The University of Kansas has adopted a revised open access policy.

Here's the policy:

The faculty of the University of Kansas (KU) is committed to sharing the intellectual fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible and lowering barriers to its access. In recognition of that commitment and responsibility, the KU faculty is determined to take advantage of new technologies to increase access to its work by the citizens of Kansas and scholars, educators, and policymakers worldwide. In support of greater openness in scholarly endeavors, the KU faculty agrees to the following:

Each faculty member grants to KU permission to make scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles to which he or she made substantial intellectual contributions publicly available in the KU open access institutional repository, and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. This license in no way irrevocably interferes with the rights of the KU faculty author as the copyright holder of the work.

The policy will apply to all scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles authored or co-authored while a faculty member of KU. To assist in the open distribution of the articles, faculty members will provide bibliographic information and an electronic copy of each article within 30 days of publication to the Provost’s Designate. The license granted to KU regarding an article will be waived by the Provost's Designate at the sole discretion of the faculty member upon written/electronic notification. The Provost's office will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its application, and recommending changes as necessary. This policy will be reviewed by Faculty Governance, in concert with the Provost's office, every three years, and a report presented to Faculty Governance. A broadly representative Open Access Advisory Board made up of faculty, representatives from faculty governance, and the Provost’s office will provide additional guidance and oversight in policy implementation.

Read more about it at KU Open Access Policy, "KU Pushes to Increase Public Access to Published Research," and "Open Access Policy Announcement" [original policy].

The Harvard Business School has adopted an open access policy.

Here's the policy:

The Faculty of the Harvard Business School is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available articles that he or she has prepared for journal peer review and to exercise the copyright in those articles. More specifically, each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of these articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. The policy will apply to all such articles authored or co-authored while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy.

Since the policy will apply only to articles prepared for peer review, it thus does not apply to Harvard Business School Cases and Notes, or to articles written for the Harvard Business Review or other publications that are not peer-reviewed. The Dean or the Dean's designate will waive application of the license for a particular article upon express direction by a Faculty member.

Each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the author's final version of each article to the Division of Research and Faculty Development (DRFD) no later than the date of its publication. DRFD will submit the article to the Harvard University open access repository; the Provost's Office may make it available to the public.

The Office of the Dean will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty from time to time. Effects of the policy will be continuously monitored, and after three years it will be reviewed and a report presented to the Faculty.

Read more about it at "Harvard Business School Approves Open-Access Policy."

Two funding agencies, Health Research Board Ireland and Telethon Italy, have adopted open access mandates that require publications resulting from their funded research to be deposited in UK PubMed Central.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Today, this aim takes a step closer as four European research-funding organisations—the Health Research Board Ireland and Science Foundation Ireland, Telethon Italy and the Austrian Science Fund—have agreed to participate in UKPMC. The funders will mandate that all biomedical research outputs that arise from their funding are made freely available—typically within six months of publication—from the UKPMC repository.

(The Austrian Science Fund and Science Foundation Ireland had prior open access mandates.)

The University of Virginia has adopted a voluntary open access policy.

Here's an excerpt from "Faculty Senate Approves Open Access, Authors' Rights Resolution":

The Open Access policy was a revision of a resolution on scholarly publications that was brought to the Faculty Senate last November, Task Force Chair Brian Pusser said. Originally, the resolution said participation would be mandatory by default but that faculty members could sign a waiver to opt out of it. The policy then was revised so that faculty members simply could decide if they wanted to contribute to the repository, Pusser said.

For background see: Faculty Senate Task Force on Scholarly Publications and Authors' Rights and "U.Va. Faculty Senate Weighs Access to Scholarly Articles."

JISC has released Modelling Scholarly Communication Options: Costs and Benefits for Universities.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement (announcement includes podcast):

The key findings from the report show

• The annual savings in research and library costs of a university repository model combined with subscription publishing could range from £100,000 to £1,320,000
• Moving from Open Access journals and subscription-funding to per-article Open Access journal funding has the potential to achieve savings for universities between £620,000 per year and £1,700,000 per year if the article-processing charge is set at £500 or less
• Savings from a change away from subscription-funding to per-article Open Access journal funding were estimated to be between £170,000 and £1,365,000 per year for three out of the four universities studied when the article-processing charge is £1000 per article or less
• For the remaining university in the study a move from subscription-funding to the per-article Open Access journal funding saw the university having to pay £1.86m more in this scenario

See also the related documents: How to Build a Case for University Policies and Practices in Support of Open Access and Publishing Research Papers Which Policy Will Deliver Best Value for Your University?.

Brian D. Edgar and John Willinsky have self-archived "A Survey of the Scholarly Journals Using Open Journal Systems" on the Public Knowledge Project website.

Here's an excerpt:

A survey of 998 scholarly journals that use Open Journal Systems (OJS), an open source journal software platform, captures the characteristics of an emerging class of scholar-publisher open access journals (with some representation from more traditional scholarly society and print-based titles). The journals in the sample follow traditional norms for peer-reviewing, acceptance rates, and disciplinary focus, but are distinguished by the number that offer open access to their content, the growth rates in new titles, the participation rates from developing countries, and the extremely low operating budgets. The survey also documents the limited degree to which open source software can alter a field of communication, as OJS appears to have created a third path, dedicated to maximizing access to research and scholarship, as an alternative to traditional scholarly society and commercial publishing routes.

Yassine Gargouri, Chawki Hajjem, Vincent Lariviere, Yves Gingras, Tim Brody, Les Carr, Stevan Harnad have self-archived "Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research" in the ECS EPrints Repository

Here's an excerpt:

Articles whose authors make them Open Access (OA) by self-archiving them online are cited significantly more than articles accessible only to subscribers. Some have suggested that this "OA Advantage" may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this we compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatory self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002-2006 in 1,984 journals. The OA Advantage proved just as high for both. Logistic regression showed that the advantage is independent of other correlates of citations (article age; journal impact factor; number of co-authors, references or pages; field; article type; country or institution) and greatest for the most highly cited articles. The OA Advantage is real, independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated with quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles receive about 80% of all citations). The advantage is greater for the more citeable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage, from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only. [See accompanying RTF file for responses to feedback. Four PDF files provide Supplementary Analysis.]