From: Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2012 06:44:50 -0400

** Cross-Posted **

A careful, thorough, well-informed, evidence-based and comprehensive
review and analysis of guidelines for open access policy and promotion
-- released by UNESCO and written by Alma Swan.

Policy Guidelines FOR THE DEVELOPMENT AND PROMOTION OF OPEN ACCESS by Alma Swan

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) Communication and Information Sector

EXCERPTS: ...Evidence has unequivocally demonstrated that to have real
effect policies must be mandatory, whether institutional or funder
policies.... Evidence shows that researchers are quite happy to be
mandated to act in this way... Policies can require ‘green’ Open
Access by self-archiving but to preserve authors’ freedom to publish
where they choose policies should only encourage ‘gold’ Open Access
through publication in Open Access journals... The optimum
arrangement, one that accommodates the needs of all stakeholders, and
has the potential to collect the greatest amount of Open Access
content, is for a network of institutional repositories to be the
primary locus for deposit and for centralised, subject-specific
collections to be created by harvesting the required content from that
network of distributed repositories...