Harvard Faculty Approves Open Access Policy
Harvard University’s arts and sciences faculty voted unanimously February 12 to publish their scholarly articles online, making them available to the public at no charge. Under the plan, the university’s library will oversee a newly created Office of Scholarly Communication that will serve as a repository for the material. Faculty members will retain the copyright to their articles, subject to the university’s license, and can request a waiver of the license for particular articles in special cases.
Harvard’s move is seen as giving a significant boost to the open access movement, which champions free, permanent online access to peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly material.
“There is no question that scholarly journals have historically allowed scholars to distribute their research to audiences around the world,” said computer science professor Stuart M. Shieber, who proposed the motion. “But the scholarly publishing system has become far more restrictive than it need be. Many publishers will not even allow scholars to use and distribute their own work. And the cost of journals has risen to such astronomical levels that many institutions and individuals have cancelled subscriptions, further reducing the circulation of scholars’ works.”
“Today’s vote in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences addresses an issue that is of great concern to all of the faculties of the university,” said Harvard Librarian Robert Darnton. “All of us face the same problems and all of us can envision the public benefits of open access. Harvard Medical School, for example, is already working with its faculty to comply with a congressional mandate that articles based on funding from the National Institutes of Health be openly accessible through PubMed Central.”
Although he commended the option for faculty to request waivers, Association of American Publishers Vice President for Legal and Governmental Affairs Allan Adler voiced concern that the plan could harm the peer review process. “This is a vendor-customer dispute over price,” he said in the February 13 Boston Globe.. “It doesn’t surprise us that all libraries feel their budgets are far less than desirable, but that’s a reality the educational community faces.”
Posted on February 15, 2008. Discuss.