Open Access News

Here are some more comments on the new Harvard OA mandate.

From Gavin Baker at the Journal of Insignificant Inquiry:

...I want to focus on the fact that the faculty, through their own governance process, themselves approved this mandate. Despite earlier evidence of the willingness of faculty to comply with OA mandates, and the support of researchers for public access legislation, this is the strongest indication yet: Yes, Virginia, scientists do want open access....

From Alexandre Enkerli at Disparate:

...In other words, this is a big victory for scholarship. Too bad publishers see it as a defeat....

From Adrian Ho at Transforming Scholarly Communication:

...Harvard FAS's decision is unquestionably a boost to the open access movement.  It is now interesting to find out how FAS is going to implement the policy, what impact it will generate, and how publishers will react to the implementation.  I wonder whether the university press would have a role to play in the long run in this new initiative to disseminate FAS faculty's articles.  Meanwhile, I think it is a good time for organizations such as the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), EDUCAUSE, and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) to come together and encourage major research institutions to start a discussion of enacting a similar policy. 

From Andis Kaulins at LawPundit:

The biggest academic news of the year is the adoption by the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences of a mandatory "open access" opt-out policy regarding scholarly articles published by that faculty....

From Dorothea Salo at Caveat Lector:

...I would be afraid, very afraid, right now if I were a journal publisher who believed my profits depended on preventing widespread self-archiving or playing dog-in-the-manger with copyright. The Harvard policy puts publishers in an extraordinarily weak position. They can’t denounce it; that’s tantamount to denouncing faculty, which would be utterly suicidal. (Publishers can and do slag librarians. They can and do slag government. They can’t slag faculty, and they know it.) I don’t think they can sue....They can’t prevent eager librarians at Harvard from setting up and filling a repository. Even their standard lines of FUD won’t work —they can’t seriously spin this as “a vote against peer review,” because really, is Harvard going to do anything that damages peer review? Of course not! All the publishers can realistically do is plead poverty, and a look at their lobbying budgets and profit margins scotches that argument....

Another viciously clever move was the per-article, in-writing petition requirement for opting out. Suddenly a publisher who wants its articles out of the Harvard IR has to contact each and every Harvard faculty member who publishes with them, for every single article published. Can you imagine the backlash from faculty? ...

Stopping other institutions from following in Harvard’s footsteps is a completely different game from stopping legislation in Washington....[T]he opprobrium the AAP faced over PRISM would be a wet firecracker by comparison. Whereas Washington is a single big fat noisy target, faculty governance bodies are legion, and they tend to do their work quietly and in private....

I have a feeling the deafening silence coming from publishers right now is deliberate. Their only realistic hope is that the Harvard policy sinks like a stone in a vast sea of institutional indifference, and the best way for them to create that outcome is to keep their mouths shut so that the initial flurry of coverage and interest fades quicker.

The ball is in our court now, we open-access advocates. We can’t let Harvard’s fusillade go quiet. Come on, Cornell. Come on, California. Come on, MIT and Yale and (dare I say it?) Wisconsin. Let’s do this thing.