See:

Harnad, S. (2008) Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University’s Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking, 14 (1). pp. 51-68.
eprints dot ecs dot soton dot ac dot uk/17298

ABSTRACT: Universities (the universal research-providers) as well as research funders (public and private) are beginning to make it part of their mandates to ensure not only that researchers conduct and publish peer-reviewed research (“publish or perish”), but that they also make it available online, free for all. This is called Open Access (OA), and it maximizes the uptake, impact and progress of research by making it accessible to all potential users worldwide, not just those whose universities can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it is published. Researchers can provide OA to their published journal articles by self-archiving them in their own university’s online repository. Students and junior faculty – the next generation of research providers and consumers — are in a position to help accelerate the adoption of OA self-archiving mandates by their universities, ushering in the era of universal OA.

“On Not Putting The Gold OA-Payment Cart Before The Green OA-Provision Horse”
openaccess dot eprints dot org slash index.php? slash archives slash 630-guid dot html

SUMMARY: Universities need to commit to mandating Green OA self-archiving before committing to spend their scarce available funds to pay for Gold OA publishing. Most of the university’s potential funds to pay Gold OA publishing fees are currently committed to paying their annual journal subscription fees, which are thereby covering the costs of publication already. Pre-emptively committing to pay Gold OA publication fees over and above paying subscription fees will only provide OA for a small fraction of a university’s total research article output; Green OA mandates will provide OA for all of it. Journal subscriptions cannot be cancelled unless the journals’ contents are otherwise accessible to a university’s users. (In addition, the very same scarcity of funds that makes pre-emptive Gold OA payment for journal articles today premature and ineffectual also makes Gold OA payment for monographs unaffordable, because the university funds already committed to journal subscriptions today are making even the purchase of a single print copy of incoming monographs for the library prohibitive, let alone making Gold OA publication fees for outgoing monographs affordable.) Universal Green OA mandates will make the final peer-reviewed drafts of all journal articles freely accessible to all would-be users online, thereby not only providing universal OA, but opening the doors to an eventual transition to universal Gold OA if and when universities then go on to cancel subscriptions, releasing those committed funds to pay the publishing costs of Gold OA.

Exchange with Elizabeth Kirk (Dartmouth College Library) regarding COPE:

“The Added Value of Providing Free Access to Paid-Up Content”
openaccess dot eprints dot org slash index.php? slash archives slash 635-guid.html