Our group wanted to figure out the state of Open Access (OA) at Yale, and what it would take to improve it.  Our project basically consisted of three phases:

1. Research to figure out what the norm is at other universities and with what, exactly, Yale should be compared.
2. Research among Yale faculty; we spoke with seventeen different professors and got their opinions about OA, and found out their concerns and whether they would support a university-wide OA mandate in the style of Harvard and MIT’s recent policies.
3. Compilation and presentation, including a draft of an OA proposal.

We read about OA, finding some really excellent resources (SPARC, Peter Suber, OASIS) in the process.  Then we talked to seventeen professors (none of the administrators we tried to talk to were available, unfortunately).  We listened to some of their concerns about OA (mostly arising from misconceptions about the peer-review process for OA journals), heard their opinions, found out what the general perception is.  To summarize: we found that most of them had some sort of idea what OA was about.  Several were enthusiastic, most were willing to give it a try, and only a few were skeptical.  This is intended to go beyond a simple class project: we’d like to extend it to an effort to get an actual organized OA campaign going here.   That shouldn’t be too hard; professors didn’t mind the idea, and there are enough people high up willing to listen (and enough people down low willing to talk) that we could get something really moving.

Our research and our results are available at http://openaccess.its.yale.edu.  Check it out!

-James, Christian, Adi, Evin, and Ben

EDIT: Okay, the link works now.  It doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, and I blame Apache for that.  I’ll redo the server setup and fix it before converting this from “class project” to actual “project”.
-Ben