Open Access, Harvard Magazine, May 2, 2008. (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.) Excerpt:
In an historic vote, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) moved to make the articles that its members publish in scholarly journals freely available to anyone....
The Internet has made this possible, but there is a disturbing countertrend: even as some kinds of information become more readily available (public-domain books in Harvard’s libraries, for instance, through collaborations with such projects as Google Books), other kinds of information are becoming more difficult to obtain. In particular, scholarly articles conveying the latest breakthroughs in technology, science, and medicine —the kind of information those afflicted with a rare disease might wish to access, and, as taxpayers, might even have funded— are locked up in expensive journals (an institutional subscription to Brain Research, to cite an extreme example, is more than $22,000 a year), or are otherwise not easily accessible.
The motion considered at the FAS meeting on February 12...[and] which passed unanimously, was, in fact, an important milestone in a much larger “open access” movement that aims to make all scientific and scholarly material, particularly articles published in peer-reviewed journals, freely available over the Internet. “The goal of university research is the creation, dissemination, and preservation of knowledge,” said University provost Steven E. Hyman in a public statement. “At Harvard, where so much of our research is of global significance, we have an essential responsibility to distribute the fruits of our scholarship as widely as possible.” ...
“Faculty members still retain copyright to scholarly articles they write, but any transfer of copyright they make to a publisher will be subject to the nonexclusive license to Harvard, which will retain its right to distribute the article freely and openly,” explains Welch professor of computer science Stuart Shieber, chair of the provost’s committee on scholarly publishing that drafted and presented the new policy....
Peter Suber...has described Harvard’s new policy as the first university mandate for open access by default in the United States, and the first to be adopted by a faculty, rather than implemented by administrative fiat. Harvard’s policy is a “default,” rather than a true mandate, because it includes an opt-out provision....Either way, compliance is expected to be much higher at Harvard than at institutions where OA archiving is optional, and where participation rates rarely exceed 15 percent....
The director of MIT’s library, Anne Wolpert, calls the FAS open-access policy “bold and visionary” —a collective action that “allows Harvard to support its faculty.” Under the current system of scholarly publishing, she says, faculty members’ intellectual content is “freely donated to private ownership.”
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/05/2008 10:35:00 AM.
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.