Open Access News

Here's another batch of comments on the new Harvard OA mandate.

From the anonymous author of Easily Distracted:

I’m very pleased by the vote in favor of open-access at Harvard. Not just because of open-access, but because it shows that it’s possible for faculty to choose dramatic changes or reforms in their way of business....

From an editorial in the Los Angeles Times:

They didn't get to Harvard by being stupid, you know. So it's not surprising that professors at the Ivy League school voted to place their scholarly articles online. They have much to gain and little to lose -- and their experiment has much for the rest of us to like as well....

[PS:  The rest of the editorial incorrectly assumes that the purpose of the policy is to "bypass scholarly journals" and peer review.  UCLA Litbrarian was the first to correct the error.]

From Andrew Lawler in Science (accessible only to subscribers):

...[P]ublishers say they doubt it will significantly affect their business....

The Harvard decision...“is not mandatory,” notes Patricia Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers in Washington, D.C. “I don’t think anyone is quaking in their boots.” Alan Leshner, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes Science), says that the new policy won’t affect publishing criteria, although it could pose “a bureaucratic problem for faculty members.” ...

Schroeder says it is too early to measure the impact of the new policy and warns that “publishers may not be quite as excited to take articles from Harvard.” ...

From John Mark Ockerbloom in Everybody's Libraries:

...I find this approach ingenious. As people maintaining institutional repositories have come to know, there are two main barriers to distributing one’s faculty’s work in one’s repository: getting hold of the work, and getting the right to publish the work. The first of these can be handled in various ways; whether the faculty, the departmental administrators, or the librarians get the content to the right place, it’s all purely a matter of local negotiation. But that’s not the case with rights. By the time we repository maintainers get content from authors, the authors have often signed their rights away to the journals that published the papers. The publishers have effectively called dibs on redistribution rights, and we can’t distribute unless they agree to it....

Some open access advocates have argued that one could design a mandate that was even more open-access-friendly. That may be, but to judge this mandate a failure (as the linked post above appears to at one point) seems to me an example of the “perfect” being the enemy of the good. This mandate is faculty-friendly as well as being open-access friendly, in that it minimizes the extra work faculty have to do and assures them the last word in access control, should they decide to exercise it. And that, I believe, is crucial to its having been adopted at all, and to its subsequent acceptance by faculty....

From Ivor Tossell in Globe and Mail:

...“It's a very interesting move, and particularly that it's Harvard that's done it,” observes Carole Moore, the University of Toronto's head librarian. Moore says she's anxious to discuss the approach with her own school's faculty, and expects it to have an impact at other institutions as well....