Yale needs to commit to mandating Green OA self-archiving before committing to spend any of its 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.
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/630-guid.html

See “The University’s Mandate to Mandate Open Access”
http://www.openstudents.org/2008/02/08/open-students-oa-for-the-next-generation/

http://www.oacompact.org/ – Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity; Text of the compact that the five universities adopted in support of OA.

http://righttoresearch.org/ – The Right to Research Coalition; Student advocacy coalition for OA.

http://openaccessatyale.org/ – Yale’s OA group; Includes an OA proposal as well as faculty interviews.