Chapter in Buljung, B., & Bongiovanni, E. (2021). The scholarly communications cookbook. Association of College and Research Libraries.

Abstract: When it comes to open access (OA) policies, faculty are often the most important ingredient. In fact, 88 percent of campus OA policies are ultimately adopted by a faculty governance body (Fruin et al., 2016). But there are a lot of important roles to play in the kitchen when preparing OA policy initiatives, such as those played by librarians and graduate students. At the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder), OA policy adoption was a grassroots effort that began with collaboration between librarians and graduate student government groups. These two groups were effective partners in a common goal of adopting a campus OA policy because each brought important stakeholder interests to the initiative. The librarians at CU Boulder working on the OA policy brought expertise about OA publishing as well as experience in advocacy and valuable institutional knowledge. The graduate students at CU Boulder brought an interest in scholarly communication and OA as early career researchers as well as a mechanism for engaging the campus community through the graduate student government legislative process. After several years of collaboration and gradually brewing support, CU Boulder formally put OA on the menu on April 22, 2015. The following recipe yields collaboration between key campus stakeholders around open access advocacy and a grassroots effort to advance support for an institutional open access policy.