It is delightful to be able to report on the impact made at the Berlin 8 Conference on Open Access by the presentation on Duke’s OA initiatives by Paolo Mangiafico, Duke’s Director of Digital Information Strategy. Paolo told a packed room about all of the various ways in which Duke has pursued open access for quite a number of years, starting with a “proto-CC” license used for some of the Libraries’ earliest digital collections and culminating, most recently, in the faculty OA policy adopted in March and the COPE fund for OA publications announced last month.
Paolo Mangiafico at the Berlin 8 Open Access conference
The impact of Paolo’s presentation was not, I think, because Duke has done OA so much better than other institutions. Other universities have made greater progress on specific initiatives. But Paolo laid out a framework of what is possible that became a kind of touchstone for the rest of the conference. The diversity of the efforts he outlined gave later presenters a way to relate what they were doing at their institutions to the overall universe of OA projects. Since reports on institutional open access strategies and policies made up a significant portion of the sessions, this framework really helped others place their own efforts, and I heard many references back to Paolo’s talk as the conference progressed.
Since all of the presentations from Berlin 8 have now been uploaded to the Conference website, I recommend Paolo’s slides, which are the first ones in session four, as well as all of the diverse presentations that went in to this fascinating conference.
As Duke University’s first Scholarly Communications Officer, Kevin Smith’s principal role is to teach and advise faculty, administrators and students about copyright, intellectual property licensing and scholarly publishing. 
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