Announcement marks new era in open access to current research, scholarship
Stuart M. Shieber ’81, Harvard’s James O. Welch Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science, will serve as director of the University’s new Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC). Harvard University Provost Steven E. Hyman made the appointment, which he announced today (May 22) with Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and director of the Harvard University Library (HUL).
“As chair of the Provost’s Committee on Scholarly Communication, as director of the Center for Research on Computation and Society and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center, and as author of the open-access motion in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), Stuart has already established a vision and leadership in the vital area of open access,” said Hyman. “With Stuart at the helm, Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication has the potential to exert worldwide leadership in promoting open access and in moving the academic world toward a more sustainable publishing system.”
The impetus for Shieber’s appointment and the launch of OSC was the adoption by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University of a policy that granted the University the right to make FAS faculty members’ scholarly articles freely available everywhere in the world. Shieber authored the policy motion, which passed unanimously.
Shieber emphasized that “dissemination of the knowledge that our scholarly activities generate is central to the mission of the University. The OSC has the potential for unparalleled expansion of the scope of that dissemination, to the benefit of our faculty, the Harvard community, academia, and the public. I am honored to be given the opportunity to lead Harvard’s efforts in this endeavor, and hope that Harvard’s activities in promoting scholarly communication can be exemplary for the academic community as a whole.” ...
HUL created the OSC to enable individual faculty members to distribute their scholarly writings in keeping with the University’s long-standing policy that “when entering into agreements for the publication and distribution of copyrighted materials individuals will make arrangements that best serve the public interest.” The OSC, which will be under the oversight of a faculty advisory committee, will be responsible for executing the University’s open-access policy. It will undertake many related activities, which could include the online distribution of Ph.D. dissertations and of gray literature (datasets, technical reports, occasional lectures), support for open-access journal publishing, and sponsoring of conferences. The OSC also will coordinate other University-wide open-access initiatives, and all the faculties of the University will be invited to join in a common effort to transmit scholarly articles to a central repository....
Shieber’s primary research field is computational linguistics — the study of human languages from the perspective of computer science. Shieber received an A.B. in applied mathematics summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1981 and a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1989. Having joined the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1989, Shieber was named John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Natural Sciences in 1993, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science in 1996, Harvard College Professor in 2001, and James O. Welch Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science in 2002.
Shieber was given a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1991, and was named a Presidential Faculty Fellow in 1993, one of only 30 in the country in all areas of science and engineering. He was named a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 2004. He is the founding director of the Center for Research on Computation and Society and the faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.
“It is because of Stuart Shieber’s tenacity and hard work that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard became the first academic organization in the country to adopt an open-access policy,” said Michael D. Smith, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. “Through countless meetings, conversations, and presentations, Stuart spoke with our faculty, and they overwhelmingly supported the proposal....”
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/22/2008 08:47:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
