Open access policies maximize the value of investment
in research by ensuring that more readers can access
research results and scholarship than if the works were
available through restricted means alone.
Universities, for example, further their educa-
tional missions by implementing open access policies
that make scholarly works more widely available. Some
faculty members have banded together at their respec-
tive institutions to express their collective commit-
ment to open access, resulting in a growing number of
university open access policies in recent years. Under
Why Make Your Work Openly Accessible? 33
such policies, faculty members typically grant to their
universities the right to deposit faculty-authored works
in institutional repositories.
Under similar policies, government agencies
require grant recipients to deposit their research
findings in open access repositories where they are
available for free public access. The National Institutes of
Health (“NIH”) Public Access Policy is one such policy. 21
The number of federal open access policies is growing,
largely because the Obama administration issued a
policy directive in 2013 designed to increase public
access to the results of federally funded research.22
Under the policy, many federal agencies are required to
develop plans to make the published results of federally
funded research freely available to the public.
Foundations that sponsor research are also
increasingly adopting open access policies. For
example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation imple-
mented an open access policy in 2015 that requires
research resulting from the Foundation’s funding to be
made available under libre open access terms.
