Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Sunday, March 23, 2008

Walt Crawford on the Harvard OA mandate and IR progress

The April issue of Walt Crawford's Cites & Insights is now online.  This issue has a lengthy section on Harvard & Institutional Repositories, reviewing a large number of recent developments and commentaries (including many by me and Dorothea Salo).  Excerpt:

...There’s a term that can be applied to any scholarly journal that boycotts work by Harvard faculty: Suicidal. Can you image the effect on any journal’s reputation once it became known that it would reject Harvard articles because it couldn’t live with Harvard’s retention of copyright?

For UC to follow suit would be wonderful: The likelihood of serious journals rejecting work from UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego or any of the other campuses in their specialties is also nearly zero. Add, say, any three or four of Yale, MIT, Cornell, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, Michigan, Penn, Duke, Chicago, Toronto, Wisconsin and the University of Texas (I could go on…), and you’d have a clear case for journal publishers: “Deal with OA…or die.” ...

It’s enormously amusing that Patricia Schroeder, president of AAP, while saying “I don’t think anyone is quaking in their boots” because of the Harvard mandate, also said this: “publishers may not be quite as excited to take articles from Harvard.” Bwahahahah… oops, sorry....