The Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication and the American Physical Society (APS) announced jointly today that they have entered into an agreement to facilitate faculty compliance with the University’s open access policies when Harvard faculty members publish in the APS journals, comprising Physical Review, Physical Review Letters, and Reviews of Modern Physics. As a result of the new agreement, APS recognizes Harvard's open access license and will not require copyright agreement addenda or waivers, in exchange for Harvard's clarification of its intended use of the license. In general terms, in exercising its license under the open access policies, Harvard will not use a facsimile of the published version without permission of the publisher, will not charge for the display or distribution of those articles, and will provide an online link to the publisher's definitive version of the articles where possible. ...
The main beneficiaries of the Harvard-APS agreement will be physics faculty members, who are no longer obliged to acquire waivers of Harvard’s prior license. In addition, other institutions and their authors may find the agreement to be a useful model in their interactions with APS and other scholarly publishers.
According to Professor Bertrand I. Halperin, Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in the Harvard Physics Department and Chair of the 2008 Publications Oversight Committee of the American Physical Society, “Harvard’s open access legislation was always consistent in spirit with the aims of the APS publication policies, but there were differences in detail that would have required faculty members to request a waiver for every article published in an APS journal. ...”
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 4/15/2009 05:31:00 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.
