Through policy making, universities and research centers can also help promote and provide Open Access to scholarship.

Here are some approaches that universities can take in making their research environment more Open Access-friendly.

Adopt policies that--

• In hiring, promotion, and tenure,give due weight to all peer-reviewed publications, regardless of price or medium
• Encourage faculty who publish articles to either retain ownership of their copyright and only transfer the right of first print and electronic publication or transfer copyright but retain the right of self-archiving of post-prints
• Create an author fee fund to help pay the article processing fees charged by OA journals when research grants can't or won't cover them
• Encourage or require faculty to deposit their research articles and pre-prints in an institutional archive, like D-Scholarship@Pitt
• Mandate Open Access to university-produced theses and dissertations and to require these works to be deposited in an institutional archive, like D-Scholarship@Pitt
• Vow to provide Open Access to presentations and proceedings produced as the result of conferences hosted at your university
• Promise to make journals hosted or published by your university either Open Access or OA-friendly
• Support Open Access to research literature and data at the institutional-, state-, national-, and international-level
• Participate in Open Access Week events at Pitt

Adapted from "What Universities and Administrators Can Do to Promote Open Access" (courtesy of Open Access Week)