Hi Heather, I think that fee ($30 or something?) is to have the thesis included in the Proquest OA site - not the institutions. Students should not have to pay anything to Proquest to deposit in your IR. At a previous institution, we had Proquest add a checkbox to the submission process that would record whether the student wanted to deposit in our IR - if I'm remembering correctly, we had Proquest remove their OA option.
Brian Meuse Digital Initiatives Librarian Brandeis University
