The Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP) just released a guide to good practices for universities open-access (OA) policies. This guide has been in the works for several years before its publication this October, and is expected to evolve and grow.

While this guide is conceived within the context of selected open access policy experiences in specific academic institutions it, nevertheless, includes recommendations that are useful to other institutions crafting open access policies.

Overview of the Guide

The guide provides a step by step approach to the drafting, adoption and implementing an Open Access policies and covers in-depth the following stages:

• Drafting a policy which defines types of policies, authors rights and issues dealing with open access archiving, and it further gives good tips on the drafting and wording  a policy
• Adopting a policy details how the policy can be adopted by the faculty and what education and lobbying strategies can be employed before an adoption vote
• Implementing a policy provides how the policy can be implementend especially with regards to article deposits in an institutional repository providing various deposits scenarios
• Filling the repository with a practical use cases in advocacy from a wide spectrum of institutions.
• Talking about a policy explains keywords and terms including 'Academic Freedom', 'compliance', 'institutional repository', 'mandates', and 'waivers'. 

Authorship and endorsements

While the guide is written and edited by renowned OA advocate Peter Suber, and Stuart Shieber, a number of experts in OA were consulted. Meanwhile, the following institutions, COAPI, COAR, EIFL, EOS, HOAP, OAD, OASIS and SPARC have endorsed the guide.

In the agricultural domain, the AIMS Website provides a listing of Open Access Policy Mandates related to agriculture, these can be browsed here.

For more information regarding this guide kindly follow this link http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/hoap/Good_practices_for_university_open-access_policies