Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Thursday, April 27, 2006

Harvard's Faculty Council hears presentation on OA

From the Harvard Crimson report on "yesterday’s meeting of the Faculty Council --the highest governing body of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences":
Welch Professor of Computer Science Stuart M. Shieber ’81 made a presentation to the Council about reducing the cost of providing scholarly publications in the Harvard libraries. “The [scholars] are doing the writing, the editing, the reviewing, and they’re doing the reading,” Shieber said. “There’s a market failure that has resulted in this system.” Shieber suggested that open-access journals might provide a new option for scholars, although many options are still being discussed. “Printing and distribution in the day of the Internet can be done in a completely different way,” Shieber said. “Access can be done at essentially zero marginal cost to anyone.”