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- 100 - CHAPTER 5 developed a toolkit, licensed CC BY 3.0 and available at https://cyber.harvard.edu/hoap/Good_practices_for_university_open-access_policies. Open Access policies usually originate from an institution’s Office of Scholarly Communications, but librarians in a variety of roles (outreach, reference, etc.) can also help craft these policies.

In addition to encouraging the development of open access policies at the university level, public policies can ensure that publicly funded research be made available under Open Access terms. This typically is accomplished through the inclusion of sharing requirements that are tied to receiving government or philanthropic grant funds. When funding cycles for research include deposit or open license requirements for publications, the resulting increased access and opportunities for reuse extend the value of that research funding. As an example, the U. S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy requires that “all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than twelve months after the official date of publication.”

The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) was introduced repeatedly in both houses of Congress in the period from 2012 to 2017, but it has yet to be approved. Should U. S. Congress approve FASTR, the bill would require federal agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to the research articles stemming from that funded research within six to twelve months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The passage of FASTR would ensure that articles based on publicly funded research are made freely available for all potential users to read, and it would ensure that those articles can be fully used in the digital environment, enabling the use of new computational analysis tools that promise to revolutionize the research process.

Open Access Myths Debunked

For faculty and learners alike, open access can seem like a scary new world, particularly since the pressure to publish has increased. There are many guides to debunking the myths of open access publishing, and reading these carefully to dispel any fear or misunderstanding is crucial in the current academic landscape.