Notes on best practices for university OA policies

• For draft text of the guide itself, see Best practices for university OA policies.
  • The present notes were formerly in the main file itself. They were removed 8/5/12 to prepare the main file for distribution.

• Currently both the draft guide and these notes are private in the sense that no outside web pages deliberately link to them. (This links to the draft guide.) However, some pages automatically created by the wiki software link to each. Is that private enough for our purposes?

To do list

• In the draft, we marked undecided questions with three slashes (///). Find and remove all instances.

• Lock ("protect") the page to prevent random public edits.

• Decide whether it's too large for one page. Should we break it into separate wiki pages? It would help to decide this soon so that we can cross-link from one section to another without breaking all the links later.

• Decide whether to launch a discussion forum (other than the wiki page discussion tab) for public discussion once we make a version public. If we do, link to it from this page.

• Decide who is authorized to revise this doc. (At the moment, it's just the HOAP principals.) Somewhere on this page, or on a separate page to which we link from this page, describe the revision process.

• We say in the preface that there are points on which there is no "best practice" yet.
  • Decide whether we should omit any current recommendations until support or evidence for them solidifies further.

• Before release, get other key partners to make their own suggestions and sign on to the result, e.g. SPARC, EOS, EIFL, MIT.
  • Make offer to COAPI, for courtesy; but don't expect sign-on since it (deliberately) wants to be hospitable to institutions with any kind of policy, strong or weak

• Consider elaborating each entry with some rationale, including (as far as possible) links to literature and evidence.

• Consider writing an executive summary of the guide, for rapid orientation or busy committees. Or consider making two editions, a short one for busy committees and a full-length version for everyone else.

• Consider including a section on frequently asked questions and frequently heard objections and misunderstandings

• Consider adding a glossary, especially for jargon and abbreviations: OA, TA, and terms like gold, green, etc.

Revisions to consider

This section both for possible new entries and suggested revisions to existing entries.

• New entry on how to handle the Elsevier policy allowing green OA except at institutions with OA mandates

Eventually incorporate ideas and language from these docs

We needn't do this before the initial release. Also consider listing and linking to these docs. Should we include a short bibliography of recommended other reading?

• Harvard's annotated Model OA Policy

• Harvard's guidelines and FAQs
  • for authors
  • for publishers

• the DASH terms of use, which make DASH deposits libre OA

• PS article on OA policy options for funding agencies and universities

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

• the recommendations in the BOAI-10 doc

• SPARC guide for campus action

Notes toward funder guide

• Eventually make a second guide for funder policies. It could be a separate doc, or it could be a new section of this doc ("Follow all the recommendations above but with these subtractions and additions based on the different circumstances of universities and funders").

• When we do, then incorporate ideas and language from these docs:
  • Phil Malone's reports recommending that funders require libre OA under open licenses; 2009 original report and 2011 update
  • this CC project

• Entry on why it's OK for funders, but not universities, to limit author freedom to submit work to the journals of their choice.

• Entry on offering funds to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals.
  • Entry on similar support for no-fee OA journals.