Public access policies can operate in many contexts.
Government agencies that fund research are increasingly interested in policies that create public access to works based on funded research. Recently the National Institutes of Health (NIH), announced a new mandatory policy. Similarly the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) have released a public access policy.
Another category of policy is institutional policies. The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences has adopted a policy that grants the university limited rights in the articles they create enabling the university to disseminate them for non-commercial purposes.
As more organizations are adopting public access policies, ARL is working to assist research libraries and research institutions in implementing those policies.