Summary from Peter Suber’s Open Access News blog. I found his steps 1-4 to be specific and do-able:
Self-archiving advice for authors Stevan Harnad, Cornell’s Copyright Advice: Guide for the Perplexed Self-Archiver, Open Access Archivangelism, September 20, 2006. Excerpt:
Summary: Cornell University’s copyright advice pages are numerous and confusing because they cover everything — from Cornell user rights for the use of other people’s work to the negotiation of rights for Cornell authors’ own work. One can give prospective self-archivers far more specific advice: The “Immediate Deposit, Optional Access” policy (ID/OA):
(1) Deposit all your final, peer-reviewed, accepted drafts (postprints) in your Institutional Repository (IR) immediately upon acceptance for publication.
(2) Set access to the postprint as Open Access immediately if it is published in one of the 69% of journals that are already green on postprint self-archiving.
(3) Otherwise provisionally set access to the postprint as Closed Access and notify the journal that you will set access as Open Access on [Date, one month from today] if you do not hear anything to the contrary.
(4) During any Closed Access interval, make sure your IR has the EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button to handle any individual requests for a single email copy — Fair Use — from would-be users who see the postprint’s openly accessible metadata: available for DSpace IRs and for EPrints IRs.
