Open Access Policies and Scholarly Communication

The first open access initiative, Budapest Open Access Initiative, which took place in 2002, defined two ways of providing Open Access: (1) by publishing in open access journals, and (2) by self-archiving articles in open access digital repositories.

Archiving scholarly articles in university repositories became a mandate (with an "opt-out" provision to be used as needed) for faculty in much of Europe, but in the U.S., it was not until after 2008, when the Harvard University Faculty of Arts & Sciences voted to adopt an "opt out" OA policy that the Harvard Model Open Access Policy began to be adopted in many U.S. universities.