Additional resources

• This is a section within Good practices for university open-access policies.

Policies of the kind recommended in the guide

Chronological by date of adoption. Links point to policies, not institutional home pages.

For those considering adopting their own rights-retention OA policies, we recommend starting with the current Harvard model policy, which incorporates the latest recommended practices described in this guide. HOAP project staff are available for consultation on drafting as well.

Also see the Open Access Directory list of university rights-retention OA policies (launched July 21, 2023). While our list below is limited to the kinds of policies recommended in this guide (roughly, "Harvard-style" policies), the OAD list aims to cover these as well as policies taking other approaches.

1. Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, February 12, 2008
2. Harvard Law School, May 1, 2008
3. Stanford University School of Education, June 10, 2008 (perma.cc link)
4. Harvard Kennedy School of Government, March 10, 2009
5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), March 18, 2009
6. University of Kansas, April 30, 2009
7. University of Oregon, Library Faculty, May 7, 2009
8. University of Oregon, Department of Romance Languages, May 14, 2009
9. Harvard Graduate School of Education, June 1, 2009
10. Trinity University, October 23, 2009 (perma.cc link)
11. Oberlin College, November 18, 2009
12. Wake Forest University, Library Faculty, February 1, 2010
13. Harvard Business School, February 12, 2010
14. Rollins College, February 25, 2010
15. Duke University, March 18, 2010
16. University of Puerto Rico Law School, March 4, 2010
17. Harvard Divinity School, November 15, 2010
18. The University of Hawaii-Manoa, March 2012, revised August 2019 (perma.cc link)
19. Columbia University, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, December 22, 2010, effective March 1, 2011
20. Strathmore University, c. February 2011
21. Emory University, March 15, 2011
22. Harvard Graduate School of Design, March 20, 2011
23. Columbia University Libraries, June 1, 2011
24. Princeton University, September 19, 2011
25. Hope College, October 15, 2011
26. University of Illinois Chicago, Library Faculty, November 21, 2011
27. Bifröst University (in English), or in Icelandic, first vote May 2011; confirmed January 2012
28. Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, c. March 2012
29. Ohio State University Libraries, March 15, 2012.
30. Utah State University, April 2012
31. Miami University of Ohio, Library faculty, May 14, 2012
32. University of California - San Francisco, May 21, 2012
33. University of Massachusetts Medical School, July 27, 2012
34. McGill University Librarians, c. October 2012.
35. Rutgers University, October 19, 2012
36. Harvard School of Public Health, November 26, 2012
37. Georgia Institute of Technology, November 27, 2012
38. Olin College of Engineering, November 28, 2012
39. University of Nairobi, December 2012 (perma.cc link).
40. Wellesley College, February 6, 2013
41. College of Wooster, March 4, 2013
42. Amherst College, March 5, 2013
43. University of Rhode Island, March 21, 2013
44. Allegheny College, May 16, 2013
45. Stanford doctoral students at the Graduate School of Education, May 24, 2013
46. California Institute of Technology, June 10, 2013
47. Oregon State University, June 13, 2013
48. University of California, July 24, 2013; strengthened, October 26, 2015
49. Bryn Mawr College, December 11, 2013
50. Harvard Medical School, June 18, 2014
51. King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), July 1, 2014
52. National University of Distance Education (UNED) (Spain), July 14, 2014 (perma.cc link).
53. Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), October 7, 2014
54. Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, October 9, 2014
55. Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard University, December 2014
56. University of Minnesota, December 2014
57. Boston University, February 11, 2015 (perma.cc link)
58. University of Delaware, April 6, 2015
59. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, April 24, 2015
60. Harvard University Center for the Environment, July 1, 2015
61. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, October 19, 2015
62. University of Massachusetts Libraries, January 6, 2016.
63. Florida State University, February 17, 2016.
64. University of Arizona, April 4, 2016
65. University of Massachusetts Amherst, April 7, 2016
66. Middlebury College, May 17, 2016
67. University of Texas Libraries, October 5, 2016
68. Simon Fraser University, January 2017
69. Stony Brook University, February 6, 2017 (perma.cc link).
70. Indiana University, February 21, 2017
71. Florida Gulf Coast University, March 31, 2017 (to take effect August 1, 2017)
72. University of Washington (Librarians), May 2017 (to take effect September 1, 2017) (perma.cc link).
73. Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, June 2017 (perma.cc link).
74. University of Washington (Faculty), May 17, 2018
75. Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard University, June 28, 2018 (perma.cc link).
76. Pennsylvania State University, April 23, 2019 (Perma.cc link).
77. California State University, Fullerton, May 17, 2019 (perma.cc link).
78. University of Nevada, Las Vegas, October 2019 (perma.cc link).
79. University of Lethbridge, December 9, 2019. Perma.cc link.
80. Butler University, April 28, 2020 (perma.cc link).
81. Auckland University of Technology, June 1, 2020 (perma.cc link).
82. Stanford University, November 19, 2020 (perma.cc link).
83. California State University East Bay, May 19, 2021 (perma.cc link).
84. Virginia Tech, taking effect July 1, 2021 (perma.cc link).
85. University of Albany, September 7, 2021 (perma.cc link).
86. University of Edinburgh, taking effect January 1, 2022 (perma.cc link).
87. University of Florida, taking effect April 1, 2022 (perma.cc link).
88. University of Maryland, April 8, 2022 (perma.cc link).
89. University of Aberdeen, November 4, 2022, to take effect April 30, 2023 (perma.cc link).
90. University of Oslo, December 8, 2022 (perma.cc link).
91. University of St. Andrews, December 19, 2022 (perma.cc link).
92. Case Western Reserve University, March 25, 2024.

Other resources and recommendations on university OA policies

• Roberto Barbera, Rita Ricceri, and Mario Torrisi, Guidelines to Setup and Configure an Appliance for the Development of Standard Compliant Open Access Repositories, Sci-GaIA (Energising Scientific Endeavour through Science Gateways and e-Infrastructures in Africa), August 2015.

• BOAI (Budapest Open Access Initiative), Ten years on from the Budapest Open Access Initiative: setting the default to open, September 12, 2012. The ten-year anniversary statement from the BOAI, with recommendations for policy and practice.

• Martin Borchert and Paula Callan, Strategies for gaining and maintaining academic support for the institutional open access repository, April 14, 2013.

• CARL (Canadian Association of Research Libraries), Institutional Open Access Policy Template and Toolkit, May 2020. The CARL template favors the rights-retention model, as we do in this guide

• CAUL (Council of Australian University Librarians), Intellectual property rights retention in scholarly works at Australian universities, early 2020 (perma.cc link).

• COAPI (Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions), Public COAPI Toolkit of Open Access Policy Resources, first released March 2, 2016. Frequently updated.

• COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories), Incentives, Integration, and Mediation: Sustainable Practices for Populating Repositories, June 18, 2013.

• Cornell University Library Repository Principles and Strategies Handbook, frequently updated.

• DORA (Declaration on Research Assessment), Inspiration and good practices, undated and apparently updated now and then.

• Stephen Eglen maintains a dynamic list of university rights-retention OA policies in the UK.
  • He also maintains a dynamic map of UK Institutional Rights Retention Policies.

• Ellen Finnie Duranceau and Sue Kriegsman, Implementing Open Access Policies Using Institutional Repositories, chapter 5 of Pamela Bluh and Cindy Hepfer (eds.), The Institutional Repository: Benefits and Challenges, American Library Association, Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS), January 2013.

• Ellen Finnie Duranceau and Sue Kriegsman, Campus Open-Access Policy Implementation Models and Implications for IR Services, in Burton Callicott, David Scherer, and Andrew Wesolek (eds.), Making Institutional Repositories Work, Charleston Insights in Library, Archival, and Information Sciences, Purdue University Press, 2015, pp. 87-105.

• EOS (Enabling Open Scholarship), Formulating an institutional Open Access policy.

• EUA (European University Association), EUA's Open Access Checklist for Universities: A Practical Guide on Implementation, 2015.

• Stevan Harnad, Integrating Institutional and Funder Open Access Mandates: Belgian Model, Open Access Archivangelism, December 23, 2011.

• Stevan Harnad, Optimizing Open Access Policy, Serials Review, September 2015.

• Stevan Harnad, Waking OA's "Slumbering Giant": The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access, New Review of Information Networking, 14, 1 (2008) pp. 51-68.

• Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, Harvard Model Open Access Policy. Annotated. Last updated, December 18, 2015.

• András Holl, Erika Bilicsi, and David Ball, Briefing Paper: Open Access mandate support, PASTEUR4OA, January 2016.

• Meg Hunt and Alma Swan, Open Access policy typology: A briefing paper for research institutions, PASTEUR4OA, September 2015.

• JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), Implementing Open Access: some practical steps your institution can take, apparently first released in 2015. Periodically updated.

• JISC, Moving open access implementation forward: A handbook for open access good practice based on experiences of UK higher education institutions, December 2016.

• JISC, OA good practice initiative: Final project report, December 2016.

• JISC, OA good practice pathfinder update: Supporting universities’ open access implementation through sharing examples of good practice, Spring 2015.

• JISC, Open access good practice: Sharing examples of open access (OA) good practice to support universities in implementing OA as efficiently as possible, Archived November 30, 2016.

• JISC, Your institution and open access, June 2013.

• Danny Kingsley, Developing policies to support open access at your university, Working Paper, Australian National University, November 2010.

• MedOANet (Mediterranean Open Access Network), MedOANet Guidelines for implementing open access policies: For research performing and research funding organizations, November 2013. Now available in seven languages.

• OpenAIRE Guidelines for Literature Repositories, OpenAire, 2015.

• OASIS (Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook), Developing an Institutional Open Access Policy, April 7, 2012.

• RCAAP (Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal), Open Access Policies Kit, March 31, 2011.

• Bernard Rentier, Institutional repositories: it’s a matter of sticks and carrots, *Research, September 2015.

• Arthur Sale, Marc Couture, Eloy Rodrigues, Leslie Carr, and Stevan Harnad, Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button, in: Rosemary J. Coombe and Darren Wershler, eds., Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online, 2012.

• Stuart Shieber, The Occasional Pamphlet. Blog entries on scholarly communication.

• Sarah Shreeves and Danny Kingsley, How To Introduce and Implement Policy in Your Institution and Still Have Friends Afterwards, Force11 course 2019. The course materials are not yet online. But see the online materials for the 2017 version of the course.

• SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Responses to common misconceptions about campus open-access policies, n.d.

• Peter Suber, OA policy options for funding agencies and universities, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, February 2, 2009.

• Peter Suber Open Access, MIT Press, 2012, especially Chapter 4 on Policies. Also see the updates and supplements to Chapter 4.

• Peter Suber, Three principles for university open access policies, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, April 2, 2008.

• SUNScholar, Practical guidelines for starting an institutional repository, Stellenbosch University, July 2012.

• Alma Swan, Policy Guidelines for the Development and Promotion of Open Access, UNESCO, March 2012.

• Sarah Tanksalvala, Running Effective Institutional Repositories: A Look at Best Practices, DuraSpace, June 15, 2016.

• Victoria Tsoukala and Marina Angelaki, Open Access Policy Guidelines for Research Performing Organizations, PASTEUR4OA, September 2015.

• UK OAIG (UK Open Access Implementation Group), Information and Guidance, December 2011.

• Juliya Ziskina, Tips for Successful Student Advocacy for Institutional OA Policies, Open Con, September 28, 2018.

University OA policies in general

• AOASG (Australasian Open Access Support Group) page on Open Access Policies.

• COAPI (Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions), Institution Contacts and their Open Access Policies.

• ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies). The most comprehensive list of university OA mandates. Also includes funding-agency OA mandates.

• Unanimous faculty votes for university OA policies. A crowd-sourced list maintained by the Open Access Directory.

• Relevant tag libraries from the Open Access Tracking Project. These are collections of news and comment on certain OA-related topics. Each tag library is crowd-sourced, updated in real time, stored for boolean searching, and available for following as an RSS feed, Atom feed, JSON feed, or on an HTML page organized like a blog:
  • Items tagged with oa.best_practices (items on OA best practices, including best practices on all OA-related topics, not just university OA policies)
  • Items tagged with oa.case.policies.universities (case studies of university OA policies)
  • Items tagged with oa.case.repositories (case studies of OA repositories)
  • Items tagged with oa.compliance (items on compliance with OA policies)
  • Items tagged with oa.deposits (items on depositing work in OA repositories)
  • Items tagged with oa.implementation (items on implementing OA policies)
  • Items tagged with oa.ir (items on institutional repositories)
  • Items tagged with oa.mandates (items on OA mandates, including funder mandates, not just university mandates)
  • Items tagged with oa.policies (items on OA policies, including funder policies, not just university policies)

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