From Peter Suber  More on the NIH OA mandate.

Many points but I pick one:

Jocelyn Kaiser, Uncle Sam’s Biomedical Archive Wants Your Papers, Science Magazine, January 18, 2008 (accessible only to subscribers).  Excerpt:

If you have a grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), you will soon be required to take some steps to make the results public. Last week, NIH informed its grantees that, to comply with a new law, they must begin sending copies of their accepted, peer-reviewed manuscripts to NIH for posting in a free online archive. Failure to do so could delay a grant or jeopardize current research funding, NIH warns….
[…]
Scientists who have been sending their papers to PMC say the process is relatively easy, but keeping track of each journal’s copyright policy is not….

PMR: Exactly. It should be trivial to find out what a journal’s policy is. As easy as reading an Open Source licence. An enormous amount of human effort is wasted – authors, repositarians, on repeatedly trying to (and often failing to) get this conceptually simple information.

I’ve been doing article and interviews on OA and Open Data recently and  one thing that becomes ever clearer is that we need licences or other tools. Labeling with “open access” doesn’t work.