As far as I’m aware, though, Penn haven’t done anything in terms of calling dibs on copyright, though; we have to work with whatever rights are left over after the publisher agreements are signed. (We do have agreements with departments to deposit work, but they don’t say anything about pre-emptively assigning certain copyright-realted rights to new creations.) If we did have dibs, we could potentially bring in more content with less work, since the copyright clearance we now engage in could be greatly simplified. But that’s basically a change in the conditions of faculty employment, which the faculty themselves would have to embrace. And at Harvard, they did.

I appreciate your thoughtful comments on the Harvard FAS decision. I suppose that the key point is that Harvard has established a “default” in favor of Open Access.

In reading about this decision, I found myself wondering exactly how it was going to be carried out. It’s one thing to “mandate” that a faculty member do X, Y, or Z. It’s another thing to get him or her to do it. As you know, when universitys have created repositories and invited their faculty to add their stuff, most faculty have not bothered to do so.

It appears that the Harvard Library’s Office of Scholarly Communication will be charged with making the policy into reality. I suspect that if they rely on the individual faculty member to submit their finished article electronically, they will have tons of problems with compliance unless they set up some sort of “automated” system, or the libarians do the work for them, through electronic harvesting.

I would guess that Harvard (and the rest of us) will be heavily influenced by the methods that NIH adopts. See “How to Comply” at http://publicaccess.nih.gov/

It is my impression that at the Penn Libraries, we have used a “Harvard Lite” policy. We have approached the Dean and Faculty of a specific school (Engineering, Social Policy and Practice, Nursing) and asked them to adopt a default in favor of publication in our repository. Then we harvest articles for each faculty member, show the list to her/him and allow them to cross out anything they don’t want added. John, have I got that right?