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...