Open Access News

Interview with Stuart Shieber, Harvard University Library Notes, July 2008.  Shieber is the Welch Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, Director of Harvard's Office of Scholarly Communication, and the architect of the OA mandate at the Harvard Faculty of Art and Sciences. Excerpt:

LN:  With open-access policies adopted in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and at Harvard Law School, what are OSC’s next steps among the Harvard faculties?

SS:  We’re talking to several other faculties right now about open-access policies.  But it’s a separate discussion with each faculty, and different faculties may want to work differently. My guess is that it will take some time for schools who want an open-access policy to come to that decision and to figure out exactly how they want to do it.

It took FAS and the Law School a couple of years to do it. Once we have the repository set up, however, any faculty should be able to use it.

LN:  What can you tell us about the organization of the OSC itself?

SS:  We’re in the process of hiring a small number of staff—a program manager and an administrative person—who will be located in Wadsworth House. Initially, the office will be responsible for running the repository, implementing the open-access policies in FAS and the Law School, and doing outreach to other schools to help them with considerations of similar policies. We need to ensure that the repository is successful in getting a large percentage of the articles by our faculties deposited....

LN:  What issues will the [OSC faculty advisory committee] address over time?

SS:  ...[S]upport for faculty publishing in open-access journals, difficult issues in monograph and book publishing in the humanities, access to scientific data, tools for supporting open access, new kinds of scholarly output such as databases and web sites....

LN:  What’s the status of the open-access repository?

SS:  We’ve started setting up a system based on the DSpace software to operate the repository. Once that’s ready, the plan is to get a small number of beta testers —maybe one or two or three of the departments in FAS— to test out the system. Hopefully, by the fall, we’ll have a version that we’re reasonably happy with where we can do a broader rollout. We’ll keep the repository confined to the Harvard campus before making an official launch that is open to everyone. But I would hope that, during the fall, we’d have the repository fully functioning....

LN:  How can Harvard librarians help?

SS:  Librarians are in contact with faculty all the time. They can play a key role in getting individual faculty members to understand the importance of placing articles in the repository. They tend to be much more knowledgeable about these issues of the repositories and open access and the importance not only for mass distribution but for the faculty member him- or herself of making articles available with open access. So that connection with faculty provides a perfect venue to facilitate the process of moving articles from filing cabinets and computers in the faculty member’s office into the repository.

The most valuable thing in the near term that people in the library can do is to take every opportunity where they meet with faculty to remind them about the importance of attending to publication agreements, about using addenda to make them consistent with open-access policies such as the FAS and NIH policies, to get them to use the repository once it’s up and running, and to track and report any kind of difficulties in using the repository or any uncertainties about rights and obligations. By letting the office know what issues are coming up we can try to address those. The librarians will be on the front line of all of the OSC’s efforts.