Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Thursday, February 14, 2008

More on the Harvard OA mandate

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

From Mike Carroll at Carrollogos.  Mike has blogged a handful of posts on the new Harvard policy (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).  Here are some bits from #3 and #6:

...It's huge.

First, this is a bottom-up initiative....While faculties at various institutions have adopted resolutions supporting open access as a principle and as a goal, this is the first time that faculty authors as a group have stepped up and really acknowledged that the Internet matters and that business-as-usual publishing fails to take advantage of the Internet as a means for spreading knowledge throughout the world.

Second, by precommitting themselves in this fashion, the faculty has recognized that copyright is an author's right. With rights come responsibilities. These authors have committed to each other that they will take greater responsibility for managing their copyrights and for providing the public with free access to their work....

1. There is reason to believe that the impact of, and citations to, Harvard scholarship will increase because it is freely accessible.

2. Harvard researchers will be able to use the rich archive of Harvard scholarship to experiment with for a variety of purposes, including developing new research tools.

3. Harvard librarians will get greater expertise than exists at competing institutions at developing, managing, and adding value to the university's digital library because they will have a regular flow of new scholarship to manage....

Faculty at competitor institutions should take note. There's an early mover advantage to be had here. Who's next?

From Matthew Cockerill (BMC publisher) at the BMC blog:

...It is hugely encouraging to note the rapid pace of change in the United States on open access issues since the passing of the bill late last year, which made mandatory the National Institutes of Health's Public Access Policy....

What is clear is that the need for open access, and the failure of the traditional model of scientific publishing to make full use of the internet's potential in this respect, are no longer issues of interest only to librarians or to activists These issues are now recognized to be important ones that all serious research institutions need to consider. The recent steps taken by Harvard and Berkeley show that universities are just as willing as research funders to take a stand on this issue. Open access is no longer just a nice idea, but is a concrete objective and over the course of 2008, the key focus will be not on rhetoric, but on the practical issues necessary to make wide-scale open access a reality.

From the editorial board of BCHeights, the independent student newspaper of Boston College:

...What We Think: Time to jump on open access bandwagon....

We applaud this initiative, for we believe that it will allow for a greater readership among both university faculty and interested students....

Although Tuesday's decision only applies to the Harvard Arts and Sciences faculty, we encourage Boston College to pursue a similar option for its professors....

From the editorial board of Washington Square News, a student newspaper for New York University:

What will it mean to be a top-tier university 20 years from now? ...

Frankly, its old news: Technology, and how universities choose to use it, will be the anvil on which new reputations will be forged....This includes...open access....

Everyone stands to benefit [from a policy like Harvard's]: students, professors, universities and the many who seek study for its own sake....[This would give] new life to NYU's old motto: "A private university in the public service."

If we want to know what it will take to become a top-tier research university, we don't have to look far. Let's just hope it's not old news before NYU catches on.

From Punya Mishra on Punya Mishra's web:

...[Here] is my motivation for thinking this is a good idea. The bottom line, at least for me, is ensuring that what I write is read by as many people as possible. Since I work at a state funded university, I believe, the results of my research and scholarship should be freely available to the people who have paid for it.  [It also helps authors.]  If Matt and I had not put our TCRecord piece out there on the web, I doubt our ideas would have received half the attention they did. People discovered the article, shared it with their colleagues and their students, and everything that has happened since then (the book, the special sessions at NTLS, SITE etc. etc.) is a consequence of its easy and immediate availability....

From T. Scott Plutchak at T. Scott:

I'm inclined to think that the Harvard vote may be more significant than the passage of the NIH policy.  That it is driven by the faculty rather than being imposed from the outside is a very positive sign.  Most important, however, is that a major university is taking a significant step towards managing its own scholarly production.  [By contrast] it is ironic in the extreme that one of the unintended consequences of the NIH policy may be a strengthening of the dominance of the commercial publishers at the expense of the society publishers.  A non-librarian colleague who works with a lot of the biomedical societies tells me that there has been a noticeable uptick in bids from the commercial guys to buy up the publishing programs of some of the societies....

If the Harvard vote represents a movement on the part of faculty toward taking more control of their own scholarly production, then that's a very good thing.

From Gregory Qualtheim at inappropriate response:

...A connected world will only develop our collective knowledge if we're willing to share what we know. Kudos to Harvard for taking the plunge.

From Robert VerBruggen at National Review Online:

...Given that this is academic work, often made possible by university salaries and research budgets, I do think it's legitimate for schools to place some restrictions on it. (My sneaky second reason for liking this is that, as a journalist, I sometimes find it difficult to get a hold of academic articles.)...