Over the past year, the University of Rhode Island (URI) has taken some steps towards shifting the default to Open Access for both faculty scholarship and student work. First and foremost, in March 2013, the URI Faculty Senate passed a Harvard-style Open Access mandate. And in February 2013, the Library and the Graduate School began making electronic dissertations and theses openly available through URI’s institutional repository. In this presentation, we will define Open Access policies and discuss why they are important. We will give an overview of our experiences with Open Access advocacy, implementation of policies, and next steps.